


The Winchester Redux

by allthebees (jamtomorrowandjamyesterday)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Supernatural and J2 Big Bang Challenge 2014
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamtomorrowandjamyesterday/pseuds/allthebees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is one particular world where Mary Winchester doesn’t get out of bed on November 2nd 1983. Her family’s blissful ignorance lasts for twelve years after that until it comes crashing down in blood and fire on November 2nd 1995. It isn’t John and his boys who swear revenge this time and the crusade for vengeance goes a little, or a lot, differently. </p>
<p>SPN J2 Big Bang 2014 entry. Art done by the wonderful missynz.</p>
<p> -</p>
<p>Dean’s birthday hurts like a fresh wound. John thinks about taking off for a few days, thinks about it when he’s sitting there staring at bright eyes and brighter smiles immortalised in a Polaroid, until he remembers a tiny finger poking at his chest and narrowed green eyes.</p>
<p>He chokes on a breath when he remembers a fierce little voice telling him that you never leave the people you love and the way he felt more chastened by that scrunched up nose and furrowed eyebrows than any CO he’d ever had.</p>
<p>John dreams of fire and blood most nights but that night he dreams of freckles and a medley of warbling, off-key Zeppelin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winchester Redux

**Author's Note:**

> The best support team ever had my back the entire way through this, from the idea to the first incarnation and the rewrite and then the process of turning it into what it is now. All my love and gratitude go to them.
> 
> Missy: you have been so wonderful and easy to work with that I can't thank you enough. The art you've created is amazing and I feel honoured that you shared that talent on behalf of this story. Thank you so much for making my first bigbang such a great experience.  
> Jen: I am so very grateful for your encouragement and support and the occasional yelling fit right from the very beginning of our friendship back in the time of Eighty Days. This story wouldn’t be anything more than a fever-dream without you, dear.  
> Em: I can’t thank you enough for both urging me on and your incredible artistic support before this was even a bigbang fic.  
> April: All I can do is apologise for the hysteria that you had to deal with and say that I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who could have dealt with the endless craziness that happens when I write long things quite as well as you have over the last few months. You’re the best.

**  
  
  
  
  
interlude: mary**  
  
 _Mary Winchester wakes on the morning of November 3 rd, 1983, with a vague feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach. John is snoring quietly beside her, arm stretched across her belly and a warm hand curled around her hip, and a little of the unease dissipates as she eases her way out of the bed without waking him.  
  
Dean is already awake when she peers into his room, rolling a pair of matchbox cars around on the floor with sleep-ruffled hair, and he scrambles to his feet and hugs her legs when she opens the door wide enough to get his attention.  
  
“Morning, baby,” she says and he smiles at her sleepily. A little more of the unease melts away as she can’t help but smile down at him. “Come and get Sammy up with me?”  
  
He wraps tiny fingers around her hand, following her down the hall pressed against her side, until they reach the nursery. As soon as they’re through the door he lets go to head straight for the crib where his baby brother is wriggling around underneath his blanket and making cooing noises.  
  
“Mornin’ Sammy!” Dean says and looks back at Mary with an even brighter smile. “He’s awake, Mommy, can we take him downstairs with us?”  
  
Mary crosses the room and scoops Sam into her arms as he makes a grab for her hair with a cheerful squeal. “Let’s go and get you changed and make your Dad some breakfast, huh?”  
  
By the time John comes down for breakfast, Sam gurgling away in his high chair and Dean’s grinning face splattered with pancake batter, the unease is nothing more than a faint thought in the very back of her awareness.  
  
Every year it fades more until by 1995 she barely feels it at all._  
  
 **i.**  
  
Dean Winchester closes _Slaughterhouse-5_ and stretches until his back cracks. He reaches for his empty glass of water and heads for the stairs. The dog follows him, heading for the back door, and he detours through the dimly lit living room on his way into the kitchen for a refill. The dog is still outside when he makes his way back up the stairs.  
  
The silence in the hallway is cold and tense and makes the hair of the back of Dean’s neck stand on end. He puts the glass on the hall table and glances into the bathroom quickly but can’t find anything amiss in there. The door across the hall is slightly ajar and he frowns. It had been shut when he’d gone downstairs.  
  
When he glances into Sam’s room he sees a shadow leaning over the bed and Dean knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it doesn’t belong there. He knows that his father is in the living room because he’d left him there not even two minutes ago. He’d grinned, shaking his head, to himself at the way John was sprawled out over the sofa with a lukewarm beer on the end table. It was only a few steps out of the way to drape the throw from the back of the armchair over him and he hadn’t even stirred.  
  
Dean knows the shadow can’t be his father because he knows there was no way John had woken up and made it upstairs in the time it had taken him to gulp down a glass of water, refill it, and head back.  
  
It only takes a split second to cross another option off his mental safe list. The figure is almost a foot taller than Beth and he’d dropped her off at home, two miles away, nearly three hours ago. He can see the Sam-shaped lump under the covers, the mop of dark hair against the white of the pillowcase, and the next step in his process of elimination just leaves his mother. There is nothing feminine, nothing at all like Mary, about the silhouette leaning over his little brother’s bed and every protective instinct in his body goes into overdrive at the realisation.  
  
He’s crashing through the doorway before he even registers than he made a decision to move. The idea of calling for help doesn’t even cross his mind as he lunges for the figure in a tackle that some distant part of his brain thinks would’ve made his coach proud. A snarl leaves his lips as he goes because  _hell_  if any creep is going to get near Sam on his watch.  
  
No sound comes out and he never makes impact.  
  
Sickly yellow eyes glow bright in the dark before he even makes it within reach. He’s between steps when something catches him and flings. He hits the wall beside the door and he thinks, with a suddenly frantic kind of panic, that there should have been a sound loud enough to alert the rest of the house.  
  
His brother doesn’t even stir as he ends up spread-eagled against the wall. Dean opens his mouth to shout for someone,  _anyone_ , and the silhouette makes a disapproving noise that sends a sharp spike of fear through his chest. The shout dies in his throat completely against his will and Dean struggles against the invisible grip, still silently screaming for his father, as it slowly forces his body up the wall and into an awkward slide across the surface of the ceiling.  
  
“Well, well, well.” The voice is smooth and faintly accented, somehow matching the smarmy-looking face that comes into view as his path skirts the light fitting, and Dean redoubles his efforts to get free even as he keeps trying to scream for his parents because  _Sammy_ and  _what the hell is happening_ and  _why are this guy’s eyes **yellow**_.  
  
“What an unexpected surprise,” the voice continues and crooked teeth appear briefly in a smile. “It must be my birthday! Usually it’s the parents or the pets who interrupt and need to be taken care of but I guess you’re the lucky winner tonight, huh?”  
  
Dean is right over Sam’s bed now, held in place by bands of invisible iron that won’t budge, and he can see that he’s sleeping peacefully. There are drops of something dark spotting his lips and Dean thrashes again against the invisible force holding him against the roof. Sam snuffles quietly, shifts in the bed, and flops a hand out of the protection of the coverlet. The blood around his mouth glistens as he turns his face into the light from the streetlamp outside. Dean snarls, knowing that it’s futile and still feeling the need to do it, and hopes that his face conveys the message because  _he is going to kill this son of a bitch dead for touching Sammy_.  
  
The yellow eyes flash, suddenly and terrifyingly bright, and Dean’s own blood runs ice cold at the low chuckle he hears just before another drop from the man’s outstretched wrist tracks slowly down over Sam’s lips. Dean struggles again, all helpless fury, but he can’t move a muscle as the man continues to hover over Sam’s face.  
  
A flick of one bloodstained finger is all the warning he gets before his abdomen splits wide open. Everything blurs under the agony and Dean can’t even scream.  
  
/.\  
  
Something warm and wet is on his face, slowly drying across his chin, and the sensation drags Sam slowly into consciousness. He rubs at it, mumbles a grumpy “What the hell, Dean? Get out of my room!” before blinking as something else warm and wet drops onto his forearm. His fingers find a damp patch, wound tight in the blanket, as he rolls onto his side and he thanks God his pants are dry because if Dean made him wet himself again he really was going to kill him.  
  
He can’t see anything, at first, which is weird in itself because Dean usually hovers really close to scare him as soon as he wakes up. There’s no wicked grin right in front of his eyes or cool puff of breath by his ear and all he can see is the open door across the room and the reflection of the light from the window against the polish of his desk. He catches the edge of a shadow on the side of his bed and frowns. “Dean?” he says, rubbing his eyes and twisting onto his back again. “What’re you doing, you idiot?”  
  
Another drop of something warm and wet falls, this one landing against the bare skin of his cheek, and he jerks his hands away from his eyes and stares straight up. Someone’s standing over him, bleeding wrist held over his face and glowing eyes yellower than any cat Sam thinks he’s ever seen, and they wink. “Good evening, Sammy,” a smooth voice says. “Expecting your big brother, perhaps?”  
  
Sam pushes himself back towards the headboard, as far away from the man as he can, and draws his legs up towards his chest instinctively. The man winks again and offers a jaunty smile that makes Sam’s skin crawl. “Well, I shan’t disappoint.” He flicks his eyes upwards as though encouraging him to look before winking again as he disappears in a heartbeat.  
  
There is nothing but a brief ripple of air to say he’d ever been there and Sam’s eyes take a second to refocus on the ceiling. They widen so much, so desperately, that it hurts. Sam can see exactly where the blood on the comforter is coming from now and Tank’s bark from downstairs barely reaches his ears before a scream tears itself from his throat.  
  
“ _Dean_!”  
  
/.\  
  
John jolts awake at the deep, booming, bark of the dog and the clatter of paws on the floorboards near the back door. His youngest’s voice a split second later, high and shrill and cracking with a breathtakingly real terror as he screams his brother’s name, is enough to shake the last vestiges of sleep off and force his body into almost unconscious action. He faintly hears the crash of the beer bottle toppling from the end table, ignores it, and takes the stairs three at a time.  
  
His feet hit the landing at the same time Mary reaches the end of the hallway where the boys’ rooms are, the barking dog on his heels, and Sam is still screaming Dean’s name as they both barrel through the doorway. Sam’s eyes are locked on the ceiling from where he is pressed up against the headboard and there are tracks of something dark shining on his face and all over the comforter. Part of John is still waiting for Dean to come skidding into the room, sleep-rumpled and bleary-eyed, but he can’t hear anything from the hallway.  
  
A swell of unease rises in his belly.  
  
“Sam!” Mary is passing him in an instant, reaching for their son, and John’s eyes scan the rest of the room for danger as he wonders where the hell Dean is with Sam screaming like that. Tank, hackles raised, continues to bark furiously and paw at the foot of the bed with a fierce urgency. John’s appraisal of the room comes up empty in the second it takes Mary to curl herself around Sam.  
  
A glance at the dog and his frantic son, still screaming for Dean, prompts his eyes to follow Sam’s line of sight and he forgets how to breathe just as the word tears itself from his throat.  
  
“ _Dean_!”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary’s whole body is quivering with adrenaline as she steps around John, lightning fast, and pulls Sam tight against her as he continues to scream Dean’s name. She whispers soothing nonsense to her youngest son to dispel whatever vestiges of his nightmare are still lingering. It has no effect as he stares past her face in unrelenting terror and she thinks, half-hysterical already, that Dean must have stayed the night at Beth’s because there’s no way he wouldn’t have come running already if he were in earshot.  
  
Her ears are ringing with the sound of pounding blood and barking and she gathers Sam even closer. Something warm and wet drips onto her arm, the one furthest from his face and she looks to John in confusion when he echoes Sam’s shout for Dean. He isn’t looking at either she or Sam in that moment and an instant flood of ice turns her insides cold as she follows his gaze to the ceiling.  
  
Dean’s glazed, panicked eyes are the first thing she sees and she stops breathing. The green stare is locked on Sam with an utterly unfamiliar fear and confusion she’s never seen on his face. The second is the blood soaking his white sleep-shirt, dripping onto Sam and the bed, and the third is the silent scream etched on his face that she almost thinks she can hear over the sudden silence in her head.  
  
She thinks that silence is the loudest thing she’s ever heard. She knows better when her own scream breaks it and the sudden rush of air, the crackle and snap as the entire ceiling, including her son, is engulfed in flames.  
  
“ _Dean_!”  
 **  
**/.\  
  
John finds his voice first. “Mary!” he roars over the sound of the crackling flames as overwhelming heat blankets them. “Mary, take Sam!”  
  
He hauls Sam off the bed and towards the doorway in one motion and doesn’t hesitate to push Mary in the same direction even as she stumbles. He knows that her eyes are still locked on the ceiling where one of their boys is burning. He’s still seeing that same image instead of their faces. “We don’t have time, Mary, goddammit! Take Sam and  _go_! Now!”  
  
Something sinks through the haze and she reaches out for Sam. His screams seem quieter but the pounding blood and roaring flames in John’s ears make it hard to hear anything. Mary grabs at Sam’s shoulders and pushes him towards the door. They’re both invisible after seconds as the smoke starts to thicken.  
  
The faint echo of their footsteps pound down the hallway but that could just be John’s pulse throbbing in his ears. He turns back to the ceiling and can’t see anything for the glare of the flames but it only takes two steps before he’s up on the bed and reaching for the ceiling. John can still see, without a doubt, exactly where Dean is because he can’t stop seeing him.  
  
The flames don’t get a chance to do more than lick, like a taunt, at John’s hands and forearms. They singe the hair and flush the skin with heat before something hits him in the stomach and launches him off the bed and onto the ground. He twists as he lands, the air leaving his lungs in a painful rush and the smell of burning flesh searing his nose all at once, and gasps for breath but only finds smoke.  
  
Precious seconds are lost as his lungs protest and the heat grows almost unbearable. He’s resigned himself, almost a little grateful, to dying there when something snags the fabric of his shirt and pulls.  
  
There’s a hazy kind of certainty that Dean is well beyond his help as he rolls with the force. Blood and smoke hang thick in the air and John needs to get Sam and Mary and  _go_. It takes almost all the strength he can muster to get onto his stomach. There is a creaking noise and a renewed surge of adrenaline hits. It is enough to get him up onto his hands and knees.  
  
There is a bark right in his ear and grabs for his shirt again. Teeth scrape against his skin as the flames spread to the wall and Sam’s bookshelf ignites. It floods the room with even more smoke and he falters, wheezes something strangled that he thinks is supposed to resemble the name of Dean’s beloved dog, but the pressure is back and pushes hard against his side.  
  
Tank barks, butts his head forcefully right into John’s ribs, and John lurches towards the door still on his hands and knees as black spots dance across his vision. He makes it to the doorway and drags himself up. Tank crashes into the back of his knees and propels him into the hall just as the window explodes outwards with an ear-splitting crash.  
  
His legs shake under him the entire way to the stairs and he stumbles to the first landing with his hand wound in the collar at Tank’s neck. He doesn’t remember making it down the remaining stairs, doesn’t even really comprehend that he’s not in the bedroom anymore, and takes a shuddering breath when the clearer air of the lower level hits his lungs.  
  
His hand is still wound in the collar as Tank surges towards the front door with John in tow and every muscle straining. The distant sound of sirens is audible over the roaring of the fire above his head and he nearly goes to his knees when his toe catches the edge of the rug in the entryway.  
  
One more staggering step is all it takes before he hits the door. It swings open under his weight and words are tumbling out of his dry mouth.  
  
“D- _Deeee_ …go-god oh g-god…  _Dean_!”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary cradles Sam against her side and closes her stinging eyes, like they’re shields, against the smoke and the tears. It doesn’t stop her seeing the wreckage of the upper level of the house and she still can’t banish the image of Dean, his own eyes wide and agonised and utterly terrified, pinned to the ceiling and consumed by flames.  
  
Sam’s screams quieten, dulled to breathless sobs, and she wipes the blood from his dirty face with the sleeve of her nightgown.  
  
“Hush, baby.” Her voice cracks at the end and a shudder travels the entire way down her spine as she hears their neighbours shouting. Someone is trying to put their arm around her and ease them both off the hood of the Impala.  
  
Mary shrugs the arm off and lowers her head towards Sam. Her throat burns as she croons softly “Mommy’s here, baby, and Daddy’s coming.”  
  
The sudden wailing of the sirens makes Sam tense up against her and a split second later she hears the thunderous sound of the bedroom window exploding outwards. The front yard is littered with shards of glass and she refuses to look up. She isn’t going to look up unless the rest of her family is going to be there, stumbling across the lawn towards the Impala, when she does. A sob bubbles up in her throat and she rocks back and forth with her eyes squeezed shut.  
  
Sam grabs at her with trembling hands, eyes fixed on the house, and her head jerks up. Malcolm Hall from across the street is shouting something and her eyes are open wide before she can even make the conscious decision to look.  
  
John crashes through the front door in a plume of smoke with the dog by his side. Dean doesn’t appear no matter how many times she begs, keening and sobbing, as John stumbles across the yard towards them and the firemen swarm the house.  
  
/.\  
  
“Mom.” Mary isn’t expecting to hear Sam’s voice when he breaks the silence of the hospital waiting room with a hushed whisper. “Mom, who was that man?”  
  
Mary tightens her grip on him and tries to forget the crackle and pop of the flames and focus on Sam’s words. They’re the first he’s spoken since his screams for Dean had stopped. “What man, sweetheart?”  
  
“In my room.” The unexpected statement clears the fog in her head a little and she glances around but the waiting room is mostly deserted.  
  
“There was a man in your room?” she asks and brushes her fingers through his hair. “I didn’t see him.”  
  
Sam nods into her shoulder. “He had yellow eyes, Mom. I thought-I thought-” his breath hitches and he quivers against her, “I thought D-Dean was trying to make me wet the bed again but-but it wasn’t. He had yellow eyes, Mom, and he called me ‘Sammy’ and asked if I was-if I was exp-expecting Dean instead.”  
  
Tendrils of ice are winding around her lungs. Sam’s breath catches again and his fingertips dig into her side painfully as he presses even closer. “He-he was  _bleeding_  on me, Mom, and when he disappeared I saw… he disappeared and then-then, Mom, oh my God, Mom-  _Dean_ was up there-” the words dissolve into hacking sobs and she thinks that her heart is going to stop.  
  
She hauls him up and towards the baby changing room where she helps him sit on the changing table and crouches in front of him. His hands are cold and shaking when she takes them in hers and looks up at him. “Sam, sweetheart, you have to tell me  _everything_.”  
  
/.\  
  
There are an interminable number of hours between their arrival and when John is released. He looks shell-shocked and there is a smear of blood on the inside of his arm that he rubs and rubs at while Mary fills out the discharge paperwork. He still rubs at it after it is gone and Mary holds his hand to make him stop.  
  
The police officers take them to a motel room in a patrol car and make meaningless conversation the entire way. Mary doesn’t mention Sam’s description of the man in his room, John croaks out a sound of agreement every now and again, and Sam stays pressed to either her or John’s side without saying anything at all.  
  
“We’ll investigate,” the elder of the officers assures them with tired eyes as they stand in the doorway. “Fire department thinks it was faulty wiring but we’re going to make sure.”  
  
Everything still smells of smoke when Mary and John curl around Sam in the king-sized motel bed.  
  
/.\  
  
Mary gets ups only when she’s sure that John and Sam are asleep. She collects every grain of salt there is in the room’s kitchenette, hands shaking, and takes a few deep breaths before assessing the room for the most likely points of entry.  
  
There’s enough there to cover the front door, invisible against the light coloured carpets, and the biggest windows.  
  
It’s been years since she’s had to think like this, in terms of exit routes and defensible positions, and the way it all comes flooding back is both reassuring and terrifying because she knows that there’s no running from this anymore. She turned tail and ran for the sake of John, for the future that her beautiful boys embodied, and it had caught up to her and torn her world right out from under her feet.  
  
Tank watches her from the foot of the bed and she scratches his head in passing each time she crosses near enough. His fur is warm and soft underneath her hands and she remembers putting a tiny bundle of that fur in Dean’s little arms six years ago. The thought stings her eyes, tightens her throat, and she has to leave the room.  
  
Mary scratches a series of tiny sigils, a key of Solomon and some obscure Hebrew that she didn’t know she still remembered, in the paint of the sill in the bathroom when she runs out of salt. She crouches, rocks back on her heels, and prays that her memory is enough to keep the tatters of her family safe.  
  
/.\  
  
John startles awake when Sam rolls over and into him with a grunt. His arms tighten where they’re wrapped around him reflexively and his eyes, gummy and sore from smoke and sleep, shoot open. “Hey, Sammy, settle,” he says and his voice is hoarse and ragged. Breathing sends a sharp pain searing down his throat and awareness hits like a semi to the gut.  
  
“S’it time for school?” Sam asks sleepily but his face remains buried in John’s neck and Mary stirs on the other side of him. Her jaw pops with a yawn and John can see the exact moment the events of the night before hit her as well because her entire body curls in upon itself. Neither of them answer his question and Mary seems to struggle to breathe.  
  
Sam wriggles again, his breath warm against John’s skin, and scrunches up his face. “Why am I in your bed?” he mutters, barely half-awake. “Have you been smoking? You smell like a freaking ashtray.”  
  
John’s entire body goes rigid and Sam rolls away from him and towards Mary who gathers him to her and closes her eyes for a moment. A tear streaks down each of her cheeks. “Dean’s gonna be mad if we’re late to get Beth,” Sam continues, voice lethargic and muffled, and John thinks that his stomach is trying to crawl out of his mouth because  _what can he even say to that_. “C’n you wake me in ten?” The sleepy sound he makes is almost a giggle. “Don’t wanna get ‘n atomic wedgie.”  
  
“Of course, sweetie,” Mary whispers, voice trembling, and Sam is fast asleep within seconds. The semi hits John again and again and again until there isn’t a single part of his body that isn’t aching with loss.  
  
“Mary,” he breathes and his throat burns. “ _Mary_.”  
  
Her hand, cool and soft, curls around his elbow and squeezes. “I got it, baby,” she murmurs and shifts Sam closer to him before disentangling herself from the lanky arms. Sam’s hands close tightly around the fabric of John’s shirt. She tucks the blanket back up around both of them. “Take care of Sam, okay? I’ll handle everything else.”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary drags herself out of the bathroom with water still dripping from her eyelashes, checks the salt lines, and makes it to the sofa in the small living area. She stares at her hands for a long moment and wonders if she just doesn’t move then maybe she can still wake up and have this all just be the most godawful nightmare she’s ever had. The things she saw hunting have nothing on the last twelve hours of her life. Hell, not even 1973 has a patch on this and a giggle, more hysterical than anything, escapes at that because 1973 and the ten year anniversary is something she hasn’t thought about in years.  
  
She lays her hands over her knees and closes her eyes with a deep breath. A sudden urge to call her father for help, to let her mother tell her that everything is going to be okay even though she knows it’s a downright lie, has stomach and her heart turning to stone inside her.  
  
A circuit of the room, a check of the salt lines and the sigils, does little to put her mind at ease and she settles back on the sofa with the dog. Some small part of her wants to cry but another is raging inside her ribcage, railing at the thought that the supernatural has picked  _now_  of all times to drag her back in, alight with the kind of fury that only grief can ignite.  
  
By the time it reaches three in the afternoon John makes it from the bed to Mary's side, moving slow and careful like his whole body hurts, and quietly tells her that he wants to know everything she knows. His voice sounds painful, like someone has sandpapered his vocal chords, and the sound of it strikes her silent for a long moment.  
  
“Should have known you’d see the salt,” she says eventually and the words fall flat somewhere in the space that shouldn't gape between them like it does. John doesn’t laugh and she knows just from the slump of his shoulders that his insides are as twisted with grief as hers.  
  
It takes Mary a while to gather herself, a while to decide where to start, and find the words she needs.  
  
“You remember the night you asked me to marry you?” Mary asks quietly after the long moments of heavy silence. She thinks that the fact John isn’t demanding she hurry up and get on with it says more for the situation than any words she could find. “When I said yes and begged you to just take me away so we could start our own life?”  
  
John nods. “The night your parents died.” A shadow passes over his eyes as the words leave his throat like they were dragged from it and Mary doesn’t think she’s ever felt quite so helpless before.  
  
“You remember how you used to tell me that my dad reminded you of your CO in Vietnam?”  
  
Another nod and there’s a steady kind of expectancy in the way he’s looking at her that dissolves the lump in her throat a little.  
  
“He wasn’t a military man,” she says and hopes her voice holds steady. “But he fought a war right to the day he died. It wasn’t any war that you read about in the paper or even one where you wear your fatigues and have a squad at your back. I grew up fighting it too.”  
  
He puts his hand on her knee, rough and warm and strong, and she swallows. “I fought it with him right up until the day  _you_  died, John.”  
  
John stiffens in surprise and takes his hand off her knee immediately. She feels the loss of the contact like a slap to the face. “Co-” he coughs. “Come again?”  
  
“A demon,” Mary says and his eyebrows lift as disbelief writes itself across the lines of his face. “We were hunting him but he killed you and he killed my mom and my dad and he said he could bring you back if I promised him one thing.”  
  
The disbelief turns into rage and John finds his voice. He doesn’t even question the existence of demons and Mary guesses that what they’d seen in Sam’s room that night was enough for even a sceptic like him. “What, you-you traded our firstborn son? For my life?  _Dean_? Mary-”  
  
“No!” Mary chokes out and the accusation feels like a tonne of bricks crashing down upon her. “God,  _no_ , I would never have agreed to that.”  
  
John doesn’t look appeased and his voice ends up lower and rougher than ever. “Th-then what? You couldn’t pay up and he decided to collect?” His mouth tightens and he barks out another ragged cough. “Why didn’t he take one of us instead?”  
  
“I don’t know,” she says and he must hear the pained honesty in her voice because he leans forward to put his hand on her knee again. The pressure is gentle, almost like a reassurance, and she leans closer to him because he has to understand that she didn’t promise their son to a demon. “His terms weren’t for Dean, John, I swear. This was in 1973 and all he wanted was permission to enter my house in exactly ten years. He swore no one was going to be hurt, I made sure that was the deal, so long as he wasn’t interrupted. That was  _all_ , John, I swear.”  
  
“Nothing happened in ’83.” John’s voice is hollow and the confusion is creeping back into his face. “Nothing happened then. Sam was born but how did-” he shakes his head slightly and makes a garbled sound of disbelief. “Tell me about what happened in ’73.”  
  
“We were hunting something. Didn’t know what it was yet but there was this man,” Mary says. She swallows audibly. “Another hunter. He ended up in town because he was tracking it too. He had this legendary gun that could kill anything, a pistol made by Samuel Colt, and was after this thing because it killed his family. He was kind of strange, we’d never seen him around town before, but he was the one who figured out it was a demon. He said he was going to kill it with Colt’s gun. When he left he told me not to get out of bed on November second, 1983. He said that no matter what I heard, no matter what I saw, I needed to just stay in bed. He made me promise him, said everything would be okay if I didn’t, and I told him I wouldn’t -”  
  
She breaks off and rubs at her eyes. “The demon was going after my friend, Liddy Walsh. We went to stop him but he got the jump on us. The other hunter almost got him with Colt’s gun but he managed to get loose. He possessed my dad.” John inhales sharply.  
  
“Th-that was…”  
  
Mary nods and leans into him. “Yeah. We didn’t save Liddy from making the deal and I begged you to just take me away. The demon killed Dad, and Mom, and then he snapped your neck dragging you away from me. He said he’d bring you back and I could get out if I just gave him permission to come in ten years from then. He said no one would get hurt if he wasn’t interrupted. Swore it. He didn’t want my soul, just permission. We had just sealed it when the hunter got there. When you woke up, the demon and the hunter were gone, my dad was dead and we ran.”  
  
John nods once and presses a kiss into her hair. She closes her eyes.   
  
“So,” he murmurs after a moment of silence. “Tell me more about demons?”  
  
/.\  
  
Sam stumbles into the living area sometime after four, bleary-eyed and tousle-haired, and his confusion is painfully apparent. He rubs at his eyes and blinks at Mary and John. “M-Mom?” he asks and his voice stumbles over a yawn. “Dad? S’goin’ on?”  
  
“Sammy,” Mary says softly.  
  
John doesn’t say anything.  
  
They both see it the second reality destroys Sam’s half-asleep haze of confusion. They are halfway across the room as his knees buckle and he barely manages to catch himself on the edge of the kitchenette counter.  
  
John’s arm keeps him upright and the other pulls Mary in to close the circle of three that’s all they have left. Sam buries his face in his father’s shoulder and sobs.  
  
/.\  
  
The motel manager knocks on their door on Friday morning, soft spoken and sympathetic and bearing paper bags of basic groceries and clean clothes, and tells John that the police have received a number of calls enquiring about them from concerned neighbours and friends. He has a list of names and numbers for them.  
  
Sam, curled against Mary on the sofa, glances up and blinks. The outside world has seemed an unimportant and vague concept up until that point. The intrusion brings it all back, starts time to passing again, and John takes the list from the manager with a grateful nod.  
  
The man backs out of the room slowly and John stares at the folded over slip of paper in his hands like it holds the answers to every question that is buzzing in his head.  
  
Mary realises as she unpacks the bags that not one of them have eaten since Wednesday night and John calls Mike Guenther while she tries to coax Sam into eating something. Sam does little more than pick listlessly at the tomato rice soup and grilled cheese she manages to put together as John rasps out words that she very deliberately doesn’t listen to.  
  
She reinforces the salt lines with the canister from the paper bag and takes a moment to steady herself while she’s crouched down in front of the front door. The kindness of the motel staff is enough to start tears prickling at her eyes again and she stays there until she hears John hang up the phone in the bedroom.  
  
There’s an ache in her chest, underneath her ribs, that pulses in time with every breath she takes. It feels like a noose around her throat, a vice around her lungs, and she rests her forehead against the cool wood of the door and lets it hurt.  
  
There isn’t a trace of it on her face when she gets up and goes back into the living area. Later, Mary settles herself in the bedroom with the phone when John has moved to the sofa with Sam and the television playing a soap opera quietly. There is a list of things that need to be done in her head.  
  
She stares at the receiver for a long moment and wonders, just maybe, that if she doesn’t call then maybe she can still wake up and have this all just be the most godawful nightmare she’s ever had. The things she saw hunting have nothing on the last two days of her life. Not even the worst days of her hunting life can touch this kind of tragedy. She settles her hand on the phone and the plastic is smooth underneath her palm as her fingers close around it.  
  
“It’s not a nightmare,” she says quietly to herself and a tear slides, all too easily, down her face. She wipes it away and the sound that leaves her mouth is too scathing and bitter to be any kind of laugh. “For Christ’s sake, Mary, get yourself together. Handle the normal things and then get on with everything else.”  
  
It takes another bitter reality check and a long look towards the doorway and John and Sam, still curled together on the sofa with Tank sitting guard between them, before her eyes are dry and her nerves as close to steady as they’re going to get. Her fingers still shake when she dials the familiar number, chokes back a sob at the thought that she knows it by heart because of  _Dean_ , and holds the phone to her ear.  
  
“Lawrence High reception desk, this is Colette,” a cheerful voice answers after the sixth ring.  
  
“Colette?” Mary says and her voice holds better than she’d hoped for. She’s been friends with Colette since before Sam was even born and considers her one of her closest friends. She can do this. “It’s Mary.”  
  
“Mary? I’ve been trying to reach you and John since yesterday!” There’s a distinct note of relief in Colette’s voice. “Genevieve Cartwright was blabbing all over the place that there’d been a fire at your place and then it was on the news but we couldn’t get sense out of nobody except that someone saw you all taken away in an ambulance. The Halls called James in for the rest of the week and aren’t saying anything. Hospital wouldn’t tell me a thing except that John was discharged early Thursday and, oh Mary, Elizabeth was  _beside_  herself when she got here. Swung by your place on the way to see if Dean had a reason to be late to get her and saw the damage. Renee came and picked her up and said if you called to get in touch with them. She isn’t in class today and we haven’t been able to find out what exactly happened aside from a wiring fault. Thank God you called.”  
  
A giggle, more hysterical than anything, bubbles out of Mary’s mouth before she can bite her lip because Beth driving by the house when Dean didn’t arrive to pick her up is something she hadn’t considered when she thought about all the normal things you have to do when someone dies. The thought of the teenage girl that is practically a Winchester too is almost enough to push her over the edge.  
  
She doesn’t remember a thing that the firemen said about what parts of the house were salvageable. She doesn’t remember even looking at the house after John had stumbled out to them. She knows that Sam’s room was almost certainly a lost cause. A violent sob follows the giggle and she bites her lip to muffle it.  
  
“Mary? Are you okay?” Colette asks and Mary closes her eyes, lets out another sob because there’s a backlog of them jammed painfully tight in her throat by now, and squeezes the receiver so hard her fingers ache. “Mary?”  
  
“Sorry,” she chokes out and swipes at her eyes. The next sound she makes is some kind of hybrid between a hiccup and another sob. It sounds like the noises Dean used to make before he could talk and she thinks about slamming the phone down, demanding a do-over, calling back when she can pretend that she isn’t teetering on the edge of a complete meltdown. She keeps talking instead. “C-can you let Sam’s teach-teachers know he-he’ll be out f-for a while?”  
  
“Of course,” Colette says quietly. “I can do that. Is he okay, Mary?”  
  
She wants to say yes but all she can manage is a strangled sound because there’s a world of difference between  _yes he’s okay_ and  _he’s alive but he watched something that goes bump in the night murder his brother on the ceiling over his bed_. Colette’s sharp intake of breath is enough for her to force “Sam’s okay,” out of her tightening throat followed by another hiccupping sob.  
  
Lying is practically second nature to a hunter and the thought leaves tendrils of ice to wind their way around her ribs and flick at her lungs.  
  
“Mary, honey.” Colette sounds relieved and worried and scared all at once and the sound of her voice is just another thing that Mary thinks is trying to make her shatter into a million pieces. All it does is remind her of the past twenty two years and how quickly it had all come crashing down around her. She doesn’t think she can lie anymore and the ice is stabbing at her insides. “I’m real glad Sam’s okay but what about everyone else?”  
  
“Fi-fire.” Mary’s mouth tastes like ash all over again and she presses the tips of her fingers into her eyes to try and stave off the glare of the flames and the  _terror_  in her beautiful baby boy’s eyes. It doesn’t work and her entire body heaves with the force of the next sob and then all that comes out is a garbled kind of whimper. “Took  _Dean_.”  
  
Colette says something, she’s sure of that much, but all of a sudden she really can’t breathe and the phone is clattering from her limp fingers onto the table beside the bed.  
  
It could have been seconds or hours, she doesn’t know, before Sam crawls into her lap and presses his face into her neck. The hand in her hair is John, she’s sure of that much, and the warmth on her legs the dog. She lifts her arms to rest on Sam’s back. His tears are hot against her skin and his sobs are quiet and confused, like he doesn’t quite know  _why_  he’s crying but can’t stop all the same, where hers make her entire body shake with the force of her grief because she knows exactly what she’s lost.  
  
/.\  
  
The sound of Mary’s sob from the bedroom sends John to his feet abruptly enough that his head spins. Sam jerks out of his dozing with a gasp at the sound of something clattering, still with a death grip on his flannel shirt, and through blurry eyes John can see the exact moment awareness hits his son too. He moves quicker than John and he disappears into the other room just as John takes his first step towards the doorway.  
  
He gets there in time to see Sam curl himself into a ball of arms and legs on Mary’s lap, the dog sprawled against her legs. Mary is shaking on the bed, pressed up against the headboard, and he sees the phone abandoned on the small table beside her. If he concentrates he thinks he can hear the faint sounds of someone shouting over it. It only takes him another second to cross the room, settle a hand in Mary’s hair as her arms go around Sam, and pick up the fallen receiver.  
  
Another second is all it takes before he recognises Colette Wilson’s voice on the other end. “Colette,” he says and his voice sounds like he’s speaking around a mouthful of glass shards. He’d been treated for smoke inhalation, told to stay quiet while his throat heals, but even this much later it still feels as though someone had tried to take out his tonsils with a white hot poker.  
  
The words spilling over the earpiece stop suddenly before the silence disappears in another flurry of questions. “John? Jesus, John, you sound awful. What happened? Is Mary okay? She just stopped talking and all I could hear was her crying and-and she said Sam won’t be at school for a while. I heard about the fire but she said something about Dean and then just stopped-”  
  
John swallows, tries to wet his lips and make the words come easier, but they stick in his throat anyway. “Was a fire’n Sam’s room,” he rasps and feels the truth bubbling up right beside the lie. “D-D-” he breaks off to cough and can’t seem to force his son’s name out because everything hurts too much.  
  
Mary is still shaking under his hand and Sam is still sobbing quietly and he tries to drag in another breath. His mouth tastes like ash, like a lie, and he swallows again. “He-he got stuck. I tr- god, I coul-couldn’t get him… didn’t-” his breath hitches around the lump in his throat.  
  
“Oh-oh my  _God_.”  
  
/.\  
  
Tank lifts his head from where it rests against Sam’s thigh, intent eyes fixed on the door to the hotel room, and John’s whole body tenses in anticipation at the warning before he even consciously thinks about it.  
  
Mary puts a gentle hand on his chest and pushes herself off the sofa. Her eyes are damp and bloodshot but she can get to her feet. John isn’t sure he can.  
  
“He isn’t barking, John. It’ll just be Jason and Renee with Beth,” she murmurs. “We’re safe here, baby, I promise.” He trusts her words but doesn’t think he’ll be satisfied until he knows why they’re safe, beyond being told that salt and the strange symbols mean that demons can’t get in, and how to do it himself.  
  
Sam leans further into John’s side, pale faced and almost boneless with apathy, as his hand comes to rest on the dog’s back. “Good boy,” he says quietly but his voice is flat. Tank settles his head back down on Sam’s thigh with a soft whining noise and John tries to force the tension from his limbs. Sam needs comfort more than John needs answers right now.  
  
By the time the knock comes Mary is already there and she opens the door slowly. John’s eyes are fixed on the door and they assess the most obvious threat automatically, because his Marine training is all he can bring to bear in that moment, as the three people at the door enter the room.  
  
Jason is John’s height, less solid muscle, and some part of him screams at the injustice of the fact that he knows instantly that three blows are all he would need to take the man he considers one of his best friends down permanently. Most of him, though, clings to the thought like a safety blanket which is somehow as unsettling as it is comforting.  
  
He knows without looking that one blow is all he’d need to take the trembling, five foot four Renee down. If he’d had any concentration to spare he might have noted that he probably wouldn’t need it at all because the woman was shaking so hard that a breeze would knock her over.  
  
The sight of Beth, though, is enough to shut the Marine training down mid-assessment and it leaves him suddenly reeling. The teenage girl’s eyes are darting around the motel room so frantically that he has to wonder whether she’s actually seeing anything at all. He sees Mary take a step towards her, eyes already tearing up again, when the girl goes suddenly and rigidly still.  
  
John knows with every fibre of his being that she isn’t seeing anything at all and that is the problem. John knows that her eyes are searching for even a single sign of Dean and he knows the moment she realises that there isn’t one because her entire body tightens like a rubber band pulled taut.  
  
The realisation tears a ragged, breathless sound from his throat and her eyes instantly snap to his even as Mary reaches for her. He can see that she knows, sees it in the way that the clear blue darkens for a split second, but the words spill from her lips anyway.  
  
“Dean. Where’s Dean?”  
  
She slips past Mary’s outstretched hand and takes half a dozen quick steps until she’s in the one position where she can see into each of the three rooms and twists around. “Dean?” she calls and her voice wavers. “Dean, _please_.”  
  
Not a single one of the four adults in the room can move in that moment, the desperate note of pleading in her voice making it impossible to even breathe, and so Sam slides out from underneath Tank when no one else moves. He takes a step towards her, unsteady on his feet, and she reaches him in a heartbeat.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam nudges Tank aside and tries to stand because he can’t bear to watch Beth keep looking around, can’t bear to hear her keep calling out, like Dean is just going to come strolling out of the bathroom in a towel with that shit-eating grin Sam can’t stop remembering on his face. His knees don’t seem to want to adjust to standing up again and she’s by his side, tucked under his arm and taking some of the strain off, just before they give out completely.  
  
“Sammy,” she says and he can feel her shaking. He can hear the words underneath his name in her voice, plain as day, and they make his whole body ache.  _Where is he what happened Sammy please I need him right now don’t you dare tell me Dean’s gone_.  
  
He blinks, sees Dean on the ceiling like the image is seared into the back of his eyelids and sobs out her name and then his brother’s like it could be an apology, and the tears fall before he can even try and stop them. They burn down his cold cheeks like fire and the sensation makes him cry harder.  
  
Beth’s arms snake around him and he throws his own around her neck and hears her quiet, frantic, litany pour out into the fabric of his sweatshirt. She chokes on the infinite loop of “ _no oh my God Dean no_ ” and then he’s staggering back towards the sofa with her weight braced against his shoulder because neither of them can hold themselves up anymore.  
  
/.\  
  
Jason lets his son Tyson, twenty five and already every inch the combat hardened Marine John will always be, into the room while Mary and Renee settle Beth and Sam. The two mothers smooth mussed hair and don’t say anything because words mean nothing right then.   
  
The young soldier takes half a minute to absorb every detail of the room and occupants. His eyes linger on his blanket draped sister and on the dried tear tracks visible on both her face and Sam’s longer than anything else before tracking across his parents to land on John and Mary.  
  
“God, I’m sorry,” he says and the words are quiet and heartfelt and almost completely undo Mary. Both she and John sees the flare of fury, the dangerous gleam that settles somewhere in that thousand yard stare, and wonder whether the memory of the blood that proves it wasn’t just the fire that took their boy is written in their faces.  
  
They know that he reads it there when the soldier pulls both Winchesters against him as he speaks, low and rough and for their ears only. “Whatever did this will not go unpunished, I swear.”  
  
Mary manages to bite back her surprise, only just, and John’s grip on the younger man tightens like a  _thank you_.  
  
It takes seventy two minutes for Beth and Sam, piled haphazardly on the sofa, to exhaust themselves into a restless sleep while the five adults watch in the kind of silence that weighs more than any words.  
  
/.\  
  
Tyson manages to get Mary out of earshot of his parents about an hour after Beth and Sam fall into an exhausted sleep. Her face hardens and she narrows her eyes at him.  
  
“What do you know?” she demands without preamble. “ _How_  do you know?”  
  
He doesn’t drop her gaze but he loosens his posture deliberately. “About what happened to Dean?” he asks carefully. “Nothing except that it wasn’t just a fire and I only know that because a normal fire wouldn’t make you and John look like you do.”  
  
She relaxes, marginally, but keeps looking at him intently. He lifts a corner of his mouth in a humourless smile. “It was an ifrit,” he says. “Three years ago. Took out half my team and they called it a bomb. Didn’t fit what I saw so I did some digging and came up with different answers. There’s this guy out in South Dakota, Bobby Singer, who helped me out. He’s the go-to hunter guy of the Midwest.” He softens his voice. “He could help you figure out what it was.”  
  
“I know what it was,” Mary says, anger flashing in her eyes, and Tyson is taken aback. Her voice lowers and there’s a note of ice that makes him think that she knows far more than he thought. “A demon. The same one that killed my parents twenty two years ago.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” he says instantly, almost before the words sink in, and looks around the room with defence in mind. “You should put lines of salt-”  
  
“I’ve laid salt lines,” she says, shaking her head slightly. “A few sigils, a key of Solomon, and there’s holy water in every room. It’s been over twenty years so I’m rusty but I’m not letting that bastard in again.”  
  
“You hunted?” Reconciling the petite, easy-going blonde woman he’s known for the last ten years with the rough and ready hunters he’s come across in the last three proves to be a little much for him to manage at that moment.  
  
“Born into it,” she says shortly and there’s an edge to the words that make it a little easier to believe. “Can you put me in touch with this Singer guy?”  
  
“Of course,” he says and then blinks at her. “How- how do you know it was this demon? Is his signature setting places on fire? I haven’t heard of a demon that does that.”  
  
Mary’s face is pinched. “He wanted something with Sam and we think Dean interrupted. Sam woke up with blood dripping on him and-” her breathing hitches and his throat tightens. “He said there was a man with yellow eyes who knew his name standing over his bed. The demon in ’73 had yellow eyes but if he was going to do anything it should have been in ’83 instead of now.”  
  
Tyson files that information away for later. Mary takes a breath and continues. “The demon disappeared when Sam woke up. The dog came inside barking and Sam started screaming for Dean. John and I ran to his room and Dean-” she squeezes her eyes shut tightly and Tyson steps forward to hug her. “He was pinned to the ceiling. It looked like he was screaming but couldn’t make a sound. I don’t-I don’t know if he was - there was just so much blood. The whole ceiling went up in flames and I took Sam and ran. John tried-”  
  
Tyson tightens his arms around her and fights down the surge of fury. “I’m so sorry, Mary,” he says softly. The interaction feels more like dealing with a victim of the supernatural than another hunter now and he feels a sharp pang of loss deep in his gut. This isn’t a random family, he can’t help but remind himself, isn’t a random mother mourning her son. He knows Mary and he knows exactly why those tears are soaking his shirt because the thought of the young man he’s been calling brother in his head for the last handful of years makes the same tears prick at his own eyes. “You did the right thing.”  
  
“I le- _left_  him.” Her voice is muffled against his shoulder but he can feel the heat of the tears on her face through his shirt. “He… he must have been so scared. He was up there and I just took Sam and I  _left_  him.”  
  
“Hey,” he says, a lump growing in his own throat, and there’s a too-familiar hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You think he would have ever thought of it that way? Are we even talking about the same guy? I don’t think I remember him ever being anything but fearless.” He splays his hands out across her back and swallows. “I’d bet my last dollar if he was screaming anything it would have been for you and John to get Sammy out of there.”  
  
She trembles underneath his hands and the fabric against his chest is soaking through quickly but he keeps holding her.  
  
/.\  
  
Mary’s eyes are red and her cheeks lined with dried tear trails when she and Tyson return. She comes to stand close by John’s side and he holds her against him with one arm while the other grips Tyson’s with a mix of gratitude and apprehension.  
  
The younger man nods once, crisp and sharp, and there’s an unspoken promise in his eyes when they meet. The tension in John eases, just a little, and grief fills the space just as quickly but the warmth of Mary at his side helps as Tyson’s grip tightens briefly before he lets go.  
  
“I’ll pick up some necessities for you,” he says quietly and nods, John noticing the way his hand twitches at his side, with a sideways glance at his own family. “Shouldn’t take long.”  
  
/.\  
  
John is the closest to the sofa when Beth stirs. Sam is a split second behind her, startling visibly when she jerks upright with a panicked sound, and John is halfway between standing and sitting beside her when her entire body seems to deflate.  
  
Renee is on her other side before John can do more than reach to untangle the blanket. Sam leans into him across the space Beth leaves when Renee pulls her into a hug, murmuring softly, and he eases an arm around his son. “I did that too,” Sam says, his voice dull, and John shifts further towards him. “Woke up and forgot for a minute.”  
  
Beth’s shoulders are shaking visibly and her response is garbled and inaudible. Sam seems to understand anyway, settling a hand high on her back, and she buries her face further into her mother’s neck.  
  
Mary looks at him from across the room as Jason moves to wrap both his wife and daughter in his arms. Her eyes are still red and watery and John blinks away the sting of his own tears all over again and says a silent prayer, a shout out to a God that he’s beginning to not believe in if he could let something like this happen, for someone up there to watch out for his boy.  
  
He looks at Mary, down at Sam, across to where Beth is sandwiched between her parents and adds a post script that he’ll look out for those of them left behind. A tear manages to sneak past his guard as he hopes that the message reaches Dean somehow.  
  
/.\  
  
John is in the motel room shower on Saturday morning, the pair of them left at the small table to push around food that neither are particularly interested in eating, when Sam blindsides Mary.  
  
“Mom, do you and Dad know who it was that killed Dean?” he asks quietly, out of the blue, and Mary blinks at him in shock as the egg slides from her fork and onto the wood of the table.  
  
He looks at her steadily and when she still doesn’t respond, just blinks silently at him, asks again. “I asked if you know who that man in my room was, Mom.”  
  
Sam’s face is set, eyes still bloodshot and tired, but he looks more aware and conscious than he has since before the fire. She can’t quite muster words yet and Sam presses again, urgent and fierce, as she swings wildly between relief that he’s interacting so directly and calmly and a curious mix of pride and anxiety at the actual question. “You and Dad are going to take care of it, aren’t you? That’s why you didn’t tell the police or anyone else that it wasn’t an accident.”  
  
“Honey-” Mary starts, still trying to piece the scattered bits of her composure back together. She hasn’t even  _thought_  of what to tell Sam yet and wonders how it had slipped her mind that he  _saw_  it all. Somewhere she thinks that she must have figured they had longer than this to come up with something after the previous afternoon and the shocked kind of fog that he’s apparently thrown off by this point.  
  
“I saw it, Mom,” he says and there’s something that reminds her painfully of Dean in the set of his jaw. “I know it has to be secret so you don’t get in trouble but don’t try and lie to me. I saw more than you and Dad. I know it wasn’t an accident and I know that man wasn’t normal.”  
  
Her chest tightens and she remembers the blood and the long, agonising seconds between Sam’s first scream and the moment they burst out of the front door. “We’re going to take care of it.” Her voice trembles but doesn’t break. “I promise you that we’re going to take care of it.”  
  
He nods, all exhausted shadows under his eyes and sleep-tousled hair, and she sees John and Dean and even traces of her own father in the stubborn face. His next words, all determination and no fanfare, slam the similarities home with so much force than she almost winces.  
  
“What was he and how do we get him?”  
  
/.\  
  
John enters the living area, borrowed sweatpants and shirt hanging a little loose around his hips and shoulders, to find Sam looking expectantly at Mary who looks a little like someone has knocked the ground out from underneath her.  
  
He stops in the doorway and rubs at his damp hair with the towel in his hands. “Everythin’ okay?” he says, voice gruff but markedly better than the day before.  
  
They remained locked in some kind of staring contest so he clears his throat and lets the towel hang loosely at his side. “Mary? Sam?”  
  
Eerily in sync, they blink and turn to look at him. He clears his throat again, feeling a sharp pang in his gut that he doesn’t really want to explore at that particular moment, and raises an eyebrow. “You two okay? What’d I miss?”  
  
Sam’s eyes turn on him. “The man who killed Dean,” he says steadily. “I saw his eyes and I saw what he did and I saw Mom’s face when I told her he was there. He wasn’t human, was he? That’s why Dean was on the ceiling.”  
  
John’s insides twist with a strange combination of grief and anger. He and Mary had hardly thought about the fact that this bastard demon hadn’t just murdered their eldest; it had done so right above Sam’s bed. The parent in him, even the Marine, wants to do everything to protect his little boy from whatever horrors they’re going to have to uncover to get to the bottom of this.  
  
Everything else in him, whatever vestiges are left of the little boy who still doubted that his own father had run out on him and had never found out what happened to him, takes in the set of Sam’s face and the glint in his eyes and thinks that Sam deserves the truth as much as he and Mary do. He’s lost one son and refuses to lose the other.  
  
“No, Sammy, he wasn’t human.”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary remembers from her own childhood that the young witnesses were always the easiest to deal with, traumatised or otherwise, because children don’t have the rigid foundations of real and make believe that most adults do. Sam, already disregarding the idea of anything being make-believe by then, just takes in the simplified version of her own childhood and brushing-over of what lives in the dark just out of sight with a tight nod. She recognises the expression on his face and knows that he’s taking her words and slotting them into a place in his new understanding of the world.  
  
She almost envies that he can adapt so seamlessly to that understanding. There is no disbelief in his eyes.  
  
“Okay,” he says when she finishes. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. “Okay. What do we do?”  
  
John settles a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “You let your mom and me worry about that, buddy,” he says. “At least for now, okay? We’re gonna figure it out.”  
  
Sam’s eyes sharpen, darting between their faces, as he nods stiffly. “He’s gonna pay, right? You’re gonna make sure he pays for what he did to Dean?”  
  
Mary’s face is stony when John looks desperately to her for a hint of how to answer that question. The question makes her bristle, all fire and brimstone, and her lips set in a line that practically screams the answer John doesn’t know if he wants to give Sam.  
  
He suppresses the chill that runs down his spine as Sam’s face mirrors Mary’s, the similarities uncanny and a little unnerving, before returning the nod. Not for the first time, he watches the two of them and feels like an outsider.  
  
It is the first time he hasn’t had Dean, the reassuring bond between father and firstborn son that was deeper than any friendship, to ease that sting.  
 **  
interlude: sam**  
  
 _The day after the fire doesn’t really exist, at least not in Sam’s mind, as anything more than some kind of hazy in-between. He vaguely remembers waking up in the unfamiliar bed between his parents, the smell of ash and smoke nothing more than irritatingly confusing, and instinctively defaulting back to the last time everything was okay. A state where he could ignore all the niggling whispers of **wrong wrong wrong you know this is wrong**  before going back to sleep and hoping it was nowhere to be felt, that everything would be okay, when he woke up again.  
  
The strange room and sight of his parents on the unfamiliar sofa, the sound of his mother’s voice saying his name and the fact that there were  **tears**  in his father’s eyes, is all the proof he needs that nothing is going to be okay ever again.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam sees that same default back to blissful ignorance, the factory reset, in Beth’s face when they wake up on the motel room sofa after exhausting themselves into a not-really-sleep. He knows exactly how quickly her stomach hits the vicinity of her knees when reality smashes the glass of that ignorance like a particularly determined sledgehammer and he knows exactly how hard her heart is pounding against her ribs when she starts to sob.  
  
He thinks that it might have been the sheer irrefutable strangeness of seeing Beth without Dean that starts his own fugue to breaking. There are so few memories of Beth without Dean that he can’t go far back enough to dredge them up and by the time her family takes her home he’s so deep in memories, ones that hurt in a way he can’t get a handle on, that he doesn’t remember much else.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam wakes up with the memories little more than a distant ache and a painful clarity forcing the questions his mother had asked in the aftermath right to the forefront of his mind.  
  
He rolls the questions over in his mind as he listens to his parents move around the kitchenette and main room. The details come to him as he thinks; the unnatural yellow of the eyes and the dripping blood and the smug certainty right before his eyes refocused on the ceiling.  
  
Mary’s words ‘ **Sam, sweetheart, you have to tell me everything’**  ring in his ears and he pushes himself up and out of the bed with a deep breath.   
  
He asks and he pushes for the, somewhat unexpected and surprising, backstory of his mother’s early life and even turns the pressure to his father who looks like he might crumble into dust under the weight of Sam’s expectant gaze.  
  
The only reason he lets the issue lie is because there is something in the sharp ice of his mother’s eyes that says it doesn’t end here, no matter how much it feels like their entire world went up in blood and fire with Dean, and he recognises it as the same burning determination that has taken up in his own gut.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam settles into the backseat of the Impala and closes his eyes so that, in the little corner of his mind that he’s guarding with the same kind of fierce determination he’d always attributed to Dean, he can pretend he isn’t alone in the backseat and he can superimpose the sound of his brother’s endearingly off-key rendition of the Greatest Hits of mullet rock over the silence.  
  
He knows without opening his eyes that his mother is sitting stiffly in the passenger seat because it isn’t  **her**  seat. He knows without opening his eyes that his father’s hands are white-knuckled at ten and two on the steering wheel and he’s sitting just as uncomfortably as Mary because he hasn’t adjusted the seat or the mirrors from the car’s last driver.  
  
Sam knows that it will take a really long time for John to adjust the seat and the mirrors back from the way Dean had left them because it will be another little thing lost that they won’t ever get back.  
  
/.\  
  
It takes every ounce of determination Sam has to cross the lawn and then the threshold of the place he’s called home his entire life. His mother is a few steps ahead of him, his father a few steps behind, and he doesn’t know whether the heaviness that settles in the air and makes it hard to breathe is clinging to them or to the house itself. The walls are blackened in places and he can see shattered glass from picture frames and blown out windows all over the floor.  
  
The smell of smoke hangs like a shroud over everything and Sam looks back just in time to see his father hesitate near the foot of the staircase before taking a series of quick steps to catch up.  
  
There’s something sharp lingering on the fringes of Sam’s senses and Mary starts to speak softly from the landing. “You notice that smell under the smoke? The sulphur?”  
  
Sam and John turn their attention to her, following her up the rest of the stairs, as she tests each step tentatively. The smell gets stronger and Sam edges closer to her as John’s breathing becomes audibly ragged. She stops and looks over her shoulder. “Demons always leave traces of it behind. Always a good sign to look for if you aren’t sure whether they’ve been around because the smell is so distinctive.”  
  
“It isn’t here now, is it?” John asks and Sam wonders whether he’s ever going to get used to this quieter, sadder, version of his father.  
  
Mary shakes her head. “No. The smell would be stronger. It could be windy or the air might all of a sudden get really heavy but the sulphur’s the best way to know.” She hesitates as John nods, leaning heavily against the wall, and swallows before continuing. “I’m going to go and check the other bedrooms. You okay here?”  
  
Sam doesn’t remember nodding but he must have done so because Mary moves off down the hallway and John sinks to the ground, face buried in his knees, and leaves him facing the charred remains of his bedroom. The man from the fire department who said they could come back had said most of the house’s architecture was still intact, something they couldn’t really explain aside from a fast response and the fact that it burned fast and hot and then seemed to run out of fuel, but that there wasn’t much except scorched walls and wrecked furniture in the upstairs rooms from when the fire flared out.  
  
He still picks his way through bits of debris and ignores the harsh intake of breath from his father because all of his attention is centred on the blackened walls and the crumbled ashes of his wooden furniture. He can’t bring himself to look to the ceiling.  
  
It could have been seconds or it could have been hours that he stood there, staring around the room that he’d lived in what feels like  **once upon a time**  or  **in a universe far far away** , before a ray of sunlight hits something amidst the wreck of his bed and he’s surging forward, regardless of the warning way the floor creaks underneath his feet, because he knows with an unwavering certainty that he needs whatever it is gleaming in the ashes.  
  
After that time blurs, somehow fast and slow and completely unmoving all at once, but the next thing he knows he’s in the backseat of the Impala again with the small bronze pendant digging into the skin of his palm and tears stinging at his eyes.  
  
/.\  
  
The ice cold clarity shatters all over again there in the house, leaving only the sharp pinpricks of pain in his palm, until it settles back into place several days later.  
  
It washes away the haze when Sam’s on his knees in the damp grass, the fingers of his left hand laid against four of the letters etched in the smooth stone, and the pendant he’d given as the first birthday gift he’d ever been allowed to pick for his brother clutched tight in the fingers of his right.  
  
He doesn’t look but he knows that his parents are standing a few yards back, red-eyed and stony-faced, and he leans forward to rest his forehead next to his fingers.  
  
“So, turns out Mom’s kind of a badass,” he whispers and doesn’t really recognize his own voice. “And he’s not really all there right now but you know just as good as me how scary Dad can be when he wants to be. We’re gonna find the demon that did this to you, okay?” He closes his eyes.  
  
“I promise you, Dean, we’re gonna find him and then I’m gonna kill him myself.”  
_  
  
  
  
                           
  
  
  
  
 **ii.**  
  
Dean’s been gone for eleven days by the time John thinks he can go back to work at the garage without expecting to see him, grease-smeared and grinning, roll out from underneath one of the wrecks out back or sprawled against the hood of the Impala. He thought wrong, as he soon finds out, and Mike tries to convince him that he shouldn’t be back yet. John refuses and stays because having something to concentrate on aside from insurance papers and trying to adjust his whole idea of real and make believe to fit Mary’s words is better than nothing.  
  
He has a sunburst pentagram tattoo inked over his heart and thinks of his son every time he feels the tight pain of the healing skin pulling when he moves.  
  
A full two weeks pass before Mary lets Sam return to school with an anti-possession tattoo over his heart, henna for the meantime, and protective sigils meticulously sewn into his uniform. He stashes a flask of holy water and canister of salt away in his pockets. It takes more convincing than John thought he was capable of to even get to the point of having a conversation about it.  
  
He doesn’t say how reluctant he is to let Sam out of both their sight either.  
  
Mary doesn’t go back to work. She waits for the first day that John and Sam are both gone from the temporary apartment that the insurance company is paying for, while they repair the house and decide whether they’re going to be able to live there again, and picks up the phone because she can’t keep waiting for the grief to fade before  _doing_  something.  
  
“Edward Campbell,” she says to the directory operator. “Greenville, Illinois.”  
  
Seven rings echo in her ears before a gruff “Campbell,” comes through the receiver.  
  
Something in her chest tightens and she feels like she’s fourteen and covered in chupacabra blood in the middle of an Illinois field all over again. Her voice trembles. “Uncle Ed?”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary is still sitting in the living room, the phone cradled loosely in her hands and the dog with his head on her knee, when she hears the quiet sound of a key turning the lock of the front door. The devil’s trap drawn on the bottom of the doormat and the fact that Tank stays where he is reassures her that the footsteps coming down the hall aren’t a danger.  
  
Sam is the first out of the hallway and he hugs her, silently, when he reaches the living area. She presses her lips to the side of his head and holds him for a moment, reassuring both of them, before lifting her eyes to find Beth and Tyson as Sam reaches down to scratch behind Tank’s ears.  
  
Beth looks pale and exhausted and Mary pulls her into a hug as Sam takes his backpack over towards the table. The girl hasn’t said more than half a dozen words at a time since the funeral and Mary’s heart aches every time she looks at her. Tyson waits by the dining table until she leaves the pair of teenagers on the sofa and heads towards the kitchen.  
  
“I got a hold of Singer,” he says quietly when Mary pushes a mug of coffee into his hands. “He says that I can bring you there between Christmas and the New Year and he’ll see what he has as far as lore goes.”  
  
She nods, wrapping her own hands around a steaming mug as well, and takes a mouthful. “I’ll put it to John and Sam,” she says. “I called my uncle earlier today.”  
  
Tyson glances up at her over his coffee and lifts an eyebrow. “Yeah?”  
  
Her hands tighten around her mug. “Yeah. Told him about what happened when Mom and Dad died.” She swallows thickly. “Told him about Dean too. He’s going to talk to the rest of the family and come here after Thanksgiving, I think, if all goes to plan. He’s sending me my old journal and Dad’s.”  
  
“The more people who have your back the better, Mary.” Tyson squeezes her forearm briefly and manages a small, lopsided, grin. “You can never have too many guns for backup, right?”  
  
/.\  
  
John’s face goes pale and a little pinched when Mary tells him about calling her uncle that night while she checks the salt lines and he follows her, watching and committing the little sigils and bits of information she adds to memory, from door to window and then into their bedroom. She remembers the way that same expression would come over his face whenever he and her father were in the same room and feels a sharp pang of sorrow deep in her chest.  
  
She winds their fingers together and settles her head on his chest when they go to bed. “Uncle Ed isn’t Dad,” she says softly, not looking up, and fiddles with the neckline of his t-shirt. The familiar position doesn’t make the strangeness of the unfamiliar room any less. “They didn’t get along so great most of the time, actually, but he always had a soft spot for my mom and me. Sometimes I thought about calling him, mending bridges, you know?”  
  
He nods once, presses a kiss into her hair, and curls an arm around her. She sighs and relaxes into his warmth. “He didn’t blame me for what happened to Mom and Dad.” Her breathing hitches. “Said it wasn’t my fault that it got Dean.”  
  
“The terms you agreed to weren’t supposed to hurt anyone,” John says and bites back the twisting feeling in his gut that he doesn’t really want to examine. “Your parents were gone before you agreed to anything and nothing happened when you were waiting for it. It might’ve been a stupid decision but wasn’t you that threw the rulebook out, Mary, so he’s right.”  
  
Later, when she’s cried herself to sleep against his shoulder and he’s still lying awake with a hand cupping the back of her neck, he’ll let the words and the blame that he’d bitten back burn their way up through his throat and die on his lips. As much as the bitter taste in his mouth says he’s lying when he absolves her completely he can’t place all the blame at her feet.  
  
He’s pretty sure that there’s more than enough of that to go around for the both of them.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam hates school for the first time in his life by the middle of November. He’s tired of the teachers talking to him like he’s a frightened animal, cornered and cowering, because he  _isn’t_. Not now.  
  
He’s tired of his classmates watching him with wide eyes like he’s going to break any second and he’s tired of the stupid senior girls getting misty-eyed whenever he goes to sit with Beth and James at lunch. He’s especially tired of the soft-spoken yearbook coordinator who asks  _him_  about a tribute page because neither of his parents is apparently able to bear to come near the school. A bitter, angry part of him wonders how they think it makes  _him_  feel.  
  
He’s tired of the fact that he’s got to go and do all this  _bullshit normal_  every day and then go home to an apartment that isn’t really home, a father that still looks almost as lost as he did when he came stumbling out of the burning house with no one but the dog, and a mother that surprises and very nearly frightens him at turns.  
  
Mostly he’s just tired of being tired because he can’t sleep without seeing his brother pinned, bleeding and burning, on the back of his eyelids.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam pushes aside the homework that, for the first time he can remember, seems completely useless in the face of everything he’s seen in the last three weeks. Mary glances up at him from the other side of the table, a handful of newspaper clippings spread in front of her, and a legal pad filled with her careful handwriting to her left.  
  
“You need help, sweetheart?” she asks quietly.  
  
He shakes his head. “I’m done. It doesn’t  _matter_ , Mom, not like whatever you’re doing.”  
  
She raises an eyebrow at him and he clenches his jaw against the surge of anger that bubbles up. He might only be twelve but he knows exactly how unlikely he is to win an argument with her when he’s too angry to think straight. “I want to help,” he says after a moment and a deep, slow, breath. “I want to know more about what we have to do to make sure the demon can’t get us again and about what you did when you used to hunt.”  
  
She looks at him for a few long moments and he can almost see the pros and cons being weighed up behind her tired-looking eyes as she gets to her feet. “Wait here,” she says and disappears down the hallway. He has to actively restrain himself from leaning over the table to look at the newspaper clippings and her notes.  
  
When she returns to the kitchen she has two leather-bound journals in her arms and slides the smaller and lighter coloured of the two across the table to him. “This was mine,” she says evenly. “Most hunters keep a journal. My dad gave me this on my twelfth birthday and told me that I needed to record all the things I knew about the things we hunted. How to track them, how to defend against them, how to kill them. That’s ten years of hunts and knowledge and thoughts right there. Everything I know.”  
  
Sam touches the cover, traces the etched symbols with eager and reverent fingers, and looks up at his mother. She looks older than he’s ever seen her look before and there’s a vaguely ill feeling in his stomach at the hardness he hadn’t quite noticed settling into her features before now. “You can’t unlearn these things, Sam,” she says, her voice low, and splays her own hand over the cover of the larger journal. “I tried to forget, to run, and you know what happened.” She makes a sound halfway between a bitter laugh and a sigh. “I don’t want this for you, you know. I said to someone once, a long time ago, that raising my kids in this life was the worst thing I could imagine.”  
  
He hasn’t answered her, turning the words over in his mind, when John’s voice comes from the doorway. “Don’t think we’ve got much choice now, Mary.”   
  
The both of them turn to look at him. He’s standing straighter, taller, and there’s the underlying hint of steel in his voice and his eyes and the lines of his face that they haven’t seen since  _before_.  
  
Relief curls in Sam’s belly, sharp and sudden, and Mary breathes out softly.  
  
She holds out the journal in her hands and John crosses the room to take it. He looks at Sam and his lips curve, just a little, as he settles into the seat beside Mary. “Can I copy from you if there’s a test, Sammy?”  
  
Mary’s giggle is startled and small, like she can’t quite believe she’d just laughed, and Sam’s is harsher and doesn’t really sound like his anymore but it’s far more than they’d had until that moment. The silence that falls after that, broken only by the turning of pages and quiet questions, isn’t quite as heavy as before.  
  
There’s something that, while not approaching hope, doesn’t feel so much like despair.  
  
/.\  
  
Mary’s uncle looks almost exactly like she remembers when she sees him leaning against the same beat up old truck he’s had since she was a teenager. A little older, a little greyer, maybe a little thicker in the middle but he still wears the same jacket and has the same military buzz cut he’s always sported.  
  
Sam is hovering close by John’s side, watching the new arrivals with a mix of uneasy curiousity and wariness, as Mary takes the silver flask of holy water that John slides into her hand and crosses the parking lot towards the truck and the Bluebird that has pulled in behind it.  
  
“Uncle Ed,” she says quietly, voice thick and a little wobbly and just this side of cracking, as she passes him the flask. “Sorry but I just- I can’t-”  
  
He cuts her off by taking a mouthful, handling the silver easily, and he’s just handed the flask back towards the others getting out of the car when she wraps her arms around his neck. “Mary, sweetheart,” he says and his arms come up to hold her against him. “God but it’s good to see you.”  
  
Mumbling some vague kind of agreement, she squeezes hard enough that some rational part of her brain says that she’s surely hurting him. She turns her head back, towards John and Sam, and doesn’t point because that would involve loosening her grip and she isn’t capable of that just yet.  
  
“That’s my husband,” she says and turns her face back towards her uncle as her grip on the back of his shirt tightens. “That’s John an-and that’s our Sam.”  
  
He nods, hand cradling the back of her head gently, and makes a quiet sound of acknowledgement. She pulls back after another moment, taking a deep breath and blinking a few times, and looks over Edward’s shoulder to where a woman she doesn’t recognise and grown men who surely  _can’t_  be her cousins are finishing the tests. She didn’t see it but neither John or Sam have spoken up and that blanks out any fear.  
  
“Mark?” she asks incredulously. “Johnny? Is that really you?”  
  
Johnny grins, crooked and endearing as the ten year old she remembers, and nods. “You got old, Mary.” Mark comes around the side of the car to stand beside his brother and smile at her too, a softer version of the gap-toothed grin of their childhood, and she almost forgets that it’s been over twenty years.  
  
“ _I_  got old?” she says, taking a couple of steps towards them, and feels something tight in her chest loosen just a little. “You two are giants. When the hell did you stop being my scrawny little cousins?”  
  
“I got big junior year but Mark here was a shrimp right up to about eighteen,” Johnny says with a sideways grin. He moves forward and wraps her in a hug. When he speaks his voice is a little rough with emotion. “You’re still just as pretty as I remember, old lady or not, Mary.”  
  
She hugs him back tightly as Mark squeezes her hand tightly and pulls her into a briefer embrace that is no less meaningful. When she releases him and steps back, John steady and warm behind her and Sam stepping to her side, she feels like maybe getting through this might not be as impossible as she’s been thinking.   
  
/.\  
  
Edward shakes hands like a Marine, John thinks, and there’s something in the way he holds on just a second longer than necessary. Something sad in the way he looks between Mary and Sam and back to John with a wistful shine to his eyes. Something in his voice when he pats his nephew’s shoulder and says quietly “Would have loved to have met your brother, Sam.”   
  
John sees the glassy trace of tears that Sam blinks away quickly before nodding. He doesn’t respond but Edward smiles like he understands, nods at John with an expression that says  _I’m sorry about your boy_  and looks like it did on every CO John saw come home from Vietnam with those same words in the lines of their faces, and then follows Mary into the apartment.  
  
Tank noses at each person who goes through the front door. They all pass his muster and he glances at John as if to confirm that everything’s okay once he closes the door. John scratches behind his ears and he trots back into the living room with a flick of his tail.  
  
A silence hovers behind them as the Campbells and Mary disappear down the hall. Sam leans into John’s side. “Wanna watch a movie with me?” he asks quietly.  
  
Wrapping an arm around his son’s shoulders, John nods and steers him towards the couch. “Sounds like an idea, Sammy. What you got in mind?”  
  
/.\  
  
Mary barely remembers her uncle’s first wife, Lucille, but it only takes her a few moments to decide that she definitely likes Annette.  
  
“I wish we could have met under better circumstances, honey,” the tall woman says gently and Mary is reminded forcefully of her own mother. “Edward gave us the basics after you called. We’ve made some calls and have some people on the lookout in case something like this happens again.”  
  
“We’re so sorry about Dean, Mary,” Mark says with a squeeze of her elbow.  
  
“We’ll do everything we can to help you keep John and Sam safe,” Johnny adds and Mary remembers that same fierce tone coming from a six year old trying to convince her that he certainly  _could_  handle the kickback from a shotgun almost as long as he was tall.  
  
“Have you gotten anything else out of Sam about what he saw?” Edward asks. “We’re still waiting on information about any other similar fires.”  
  
“We’re going to see someone after Christmas,” Mary says after a few seconds. “A man in South Dakota. Robert Singer’s his name. You heard of him? He’s supposed to know a lot about demons.”  
  
“Singer?” Edward asks. “Yeah, I’ve heard a little. Not exactly the social type though.” He frowns slightly. “He’s pretty free with information but it usually comes relayed through a couple of hunters. How’d you get in touch with him?”  
  
Mary traces the outline of an imperfection in the wood of the table with her fingers. “Dean’s girlfriend’s brother is a Marine,” she says. “An ifrit took out a bunch of them in combat and he’s been doing freelance hunting with Singer the past few years. He put us in contact and called in a favour.”  
  
“I heard a younger hunter with Marine training took down a Wendigo a few months back,” Annette says. “Not a really old one, granted, but everyone said he was crazy for going after it on his own. He came back with hardly a scratch on him. That your friend?”  
  
“Probably,” Mary says and makes a mental note to ask Tyson about it. “He’s going to stop by tomorrow.” She shakes her head a little to clear it. “If you’re still going to be here, I mean.”  
  
Johnny grins at her again, lopsided and heartbreakingly familiar, and she grasps his hand when he reaches for hers. “Ain’t getting rid of us that soon, Mary.”  
  
/.\  
  
John is blinking away what he’ll deny are tears, because he has no idea how the hell this is appropriate for kids, when Sam shifts against his shoulder. “Dean loved this movie.” His voice is quiet and a little shaky. “He pretended to hate it but he always cried right here too.”  
  
His chest tightens and he leans back into Sam. “Yeah? Seems kind of chick flicky for him. He always did like animated stuff though.”  
  
Sam nods and John feels moisture seep through the sleeve of his shirt. “Beth wanted to see it in the movies so he took her. She told me he cried and made her promise never to tell anyone about it but she just laughed and bought it for him when it came out on tape.” They both watch as Simba pleads for Mufasa to wake up and John’s eyes sting while Sam lets out a tiny, hiccupping sob. “He was watching it in his room one afternoon and I came in and then we watched it together and we both cried.”  
  
They watch in silence for a while, tears drying, until Sam shifts again. The lion, meerkat and warthog are singing and John is almost unwillingly entranced by the song. “If you and Mom were downstairs or out then we would sing this too,” Sam murmurs. “Really loudly and really badly. It was his favourite part.”  
  
John can’t help but snort a laugh at that. “Takes talent to sing as badly as him,” he agrees quietly and a warmth settles in his stomach to temper the pang of grief when he thinks of all the favourite songs he’d listened to Dean butcher over the years. “Think it was on purpose?”  
  
Sam nods against his arm and John glances down in time to catch a glimpse of a smile. “Definitely.”  
  
 _The Lion King_  lasts for eighty nine minutes and, in those, John learns more about the son he thought he knew better than anyone else in the world than he thinks he learned in the last sixteen years.  
  
/.\  
  
Mary glances up from her father’s journal when she hears the door creak. John and Sam, looking more relaxed than she’s seen them in weeks, are framed in the doorway. The corner of John’s mouth lifts in a slight smile. “Sammy and me were thinking pizza,” he says. “Place downtown does a hell of a meat-lovers.”  
  
Johnny straightens immediately, eyes shooting to the doorway, and nods in agreement. “You had me at pizza.”  
  
“That sounds good,” Edward says, rubbing at his eyes from where he’s bent over his own journal, and glances sideways at Annette and Mark. “I’m not fussy.” Annette echoes him.  
  
“So long as there’s no plant-life on it I’ll eat it,” Mark agrees.  
  
Mary swallows around the sudden, inexplicable, lump in her throat and manages a nod. “Pizza sounds great. You guys doing okay?”  
  
Sam nods and steps from John’s side to skirt the table and come to hers. “We’re good, Mom. Are you?”  
  
The lump grows bigger as he hugs her quickly around the shoulders. “I’m good, sweetheart.” She hugs his waist, hard, and takes a calming breath. “Your movie done?”  
  
He nods again as John heads for the phone. “Yeah.” His eyes flicker around the room, settling briefly on each person, and the determination that both terrifies her and makes her ache with a bitter kind of pride eases into his features. “What have you figured out?”  
  
Edward looks at her with a raised eyebrow and Annette’s eyes widen a little in understanding. Johnny and Mark share a surprised look. She looks up at her son and reaches to ruffle his hair. “Go grab the journal and we’ll fill you both in when your dad’s done ordering dinner, okay?”  
  
Sam disappears down the hallway. Mary looks at her uncle and the lump is bigger than ever. “I never wanted him in this,” she says as John comes back into the room. He meets her eyes, gaze dark and warm and familiar, and closes her fingers around her pen. “Never. I wish I could have told him it was an electrical fault like everyone else thinks but he  _saw_  it.”  
  
Her words settle in a heavy silence and, when Sam returns, he pauses for a moment. Mark shifts his seat to the side and tilts his head towards the space next to him. “There’s room here,” he says easily. “Wanna show me what you’ve already got?”  
  
Sam slides into the seat quickly, ignoring the eyes of the rest of the room, and flips open the journal to his own notes immediately. His eyes spark with determination and his voice is steady and confident as he shows Mark the page where he’d written everything he could remember about the demon standing over his bed that night. Johnny leans closer from the other side of his brother, impressed, to join in.  
  
When Mary and John find each other’s eyes again, amidst the quiet conversation that starts up, an understanding passes silently between them. Edward, hand resting over Annette’s, catches both their gazes and the same understanding burns behind his grey eyes.  
  
Annette looks from her husband to Mary and John. “I think this demon picked the wrong family to go after,” she says and glances across the table to where Sam is looking up at them from the journal. She nods at him and then fixes her eyes on Mary. “We’ll help you finish this, honey. You don’t mess with Campbells.”  
  
“Or Winchesters.” John’s voice is still rougher than it was before the fire but there’s no bite to the words, simply a statement of fact, as he looks to Sam. “You don’t mess with any of us.”  
  
/.\  
  
Thanksgiving morning dawns cool and crisp. Mary stops in the doorway and sees Sam curled on the sofa underneath a plain afghan, early morning cartoons playing quietly, with Tank on the floor in front of him. Her journal is on the end table closest to him, a notebook tucked underneath it, and she crosses the room to cup his cheek gently. “Morning, sweetheart. Happy Thanksgiving.”  
  
He grabs her hand and holds it for a moment. “Mornin’,” he murmurs before he releases it and relaxes into the sofa cushions and his blanket nest again. “You too.”  
  
She brushes some hair from his forehead and kisses it lightly. “You want some breakfast?”  
  
He nods before catching her hand again. “Not pancakes, please.”  
  
Her throat tightens but she nods and strokes his cheek with her thumb. “French toast okay? I think we’ve got some frozen berries and syrup.”  
  
His soft sound of agreement is echoed by a vague rumbling noise coming from the dog who looks up sharply, as though startled, and they both find themselves snorting with laughter. It catches them just as off-guard as it has every other time they’ve laughed in the past few weeks. Mary ruffles the fur between Tank’s ears and straightens up before heading back towards the kitchen.  
  
John makes his way into the kitchen twenty minutes later, fumbling with the coffeemaker, while she slides a few slices of still warm French toast onto a third plate and tops them with berries and a liberal drizzle of syrup. He blinks at the plate for a few seconds, a furrow of vague confusion between his eyebrows, before his eyes clear and he lets out a quiet “oh” of understanding.  
  
They take the food and coffee into the living room, a mug of hot chocolate cradled in the crook of Mary’s elbow, and settle on the sofa as well. Sam leans into her side as they watch the Coyote fail to catch the Roadrunner over and over again and they stay there long after the food is gone because there is something comforting about the easy silence underneath the noise of the television.  
  
Later, Mary is wrist deep in apple pieces, vanilla beans and sugar and about to open her mouth and call for Dean to come test the filling when reality hits her all over again and her throat tightens painfully.  
  
She isn’t in  _her_  kitchen and he isn’t going to come even if she calls.  
  
The wooden spoon clatters to the ground as Mary tries to catch her breath. John appears in the doorway seconds later, face tight with worry, and is by her side in three strides. “Hey, hey,” he murmurs. He eases an arm around her waist and takes her weight off the counter as he flicks the burner off with his other hand. “Easy there.”  
  
“I’m okay,” she says shakily after a few moments, her fingers wound in the fabric of his shirt, and steadies herself enough to stand up straight. “Sorry, I’m okay, I just-”  
  
“It’s okay,” John says, keeping a loose hold on her, and kisses her forehead lightly. His own chest is tight as every breath sears his nose with the smell of apple and cinnamon and buttery pastry. “Don’t need to explain. We’ll leave it, okay? Just leave it and we’ll go over to Jason and Renee’s and try and get through a few more hours.”  
  
When they leave the house, Mary still trembling a little, Sam has a white-knuckled grip on a battered VCR tape. John ruffles his hair and squeezes his wrist lightly in silent, tacit, agreement when he sees the faded cover. His son looks up at him, eyes too big and too wide and too  _young_  in his face for John’s heart to bear in that moment, and swallows.  
  
“We still gotta watch it,” he says quietly. His lower lip wavers before he sets his jaw. “S’tradition.”  
  
Later, at the Richardson’s, there isn’t a single dry eye when Charlie finds the golden ticket.  
  
/.\  
  
December is quiet and cold.  
  
Sam goes to school and John goes to work and Mary throws herself headfirst back into the hunting world. A timeline begins to form, vague and uncertain, but _something_ to go on.  
  
Sam comes home from school and divides his attention between homework and Mary’s recounting of whatever lesson she deems necessary that day.  
  
John comes home from work and tries half-heartedly to keep Sam focused until he finds himself drawn just as deeply into the supernatural.  
  
The tales of the chupacabras and the skinwalkers always win out over geometry and book reports in the end.  
  
“This is our life now,” Mary whispers at night with her hand pressed against John’s heart, the steady thump reassuring against her palm, and her voice never wavers anymore. “This is what  we do.”  
  
Sometimes he thinks that maybe they imagined it. That the trauma of the fire was too much for them to deal with and that they came up with this crazy explanation for a senseless tragedy because the alternative was accepting that Dean died for no reason.  
  
He only thinks that until he remembers the sight of the blood on Sam’s face and the sound of his screams. He flashes back to Vietnam and the stench of cordite and death underneath the damp weight of the air and remembers thinking that he thought he’d never experience worse.  
  
Even all these years later the bodies he remembers on the muddied ground have faces when he thinks about them. They all bear Dean’s face now and the rainforests and trenches are alight with his son just out of reach and the crackle of flames in his ears.  
  
Anything seems possible when he remembers looking up to find his boy bleeding on the ceiling and John knows that he couldn’t imagine that.  
  
/.\  
  
Christmas passes without much at all to mark it. On Christmas Eve Sam watches the Charlie Brown special with Tank curled around him on the sofa, clinging to the routine with everything he has, and John reads more of Mary’s father’s journal to keep busy because he doesn’t know what else to do.  
  
Mary pours over maps and weather charts that begin to blur sooner than she’d like before taking John’s hand and leading him to the sofa where they take up places either side of their son. Sam restarts the tape silently when they sit down and none of them make it to their own beds before they fall into an exhausted sleep.  
  
They wake late the next morning and the silence feels a little less stifling. John is the one to break it around lunch time when he suggests taking the dog for a walk. Sam holds the leash and Mary and John walk behind him, hands tangled like they haven’t been in years, as Tank leads them on a winding route through town.  
  
When they return the television stays off and Mary makes a simple pasta instead of their usual roast. She spreads a recent delivery of books dealing with mythology and other aspects of the supernatural over the kitchen table and teaches her husband and son like her own parents had taught her years ago.  
  
Sam has taken to Latin like a fish to water and Mary laughs, quiet and a little disbelieving, when he corrects John’s pronunciation.  
  
The first thing she teaches them is an exorcism.  
  
/.\  
  
Bobby Singer’s seen a hell of a lot of hunters pass through his salvage yard over the last twenty years and he can count the ones he genuinely likes on one hand. Tyson Richardson is one, for all that the cocky kid can infuriate him like few else, and he’s trying to keep an open mind as best he can based purely on that.  
  
The story Tyson told him was enough to make even his hardened old heart hurt for the Winchester family. The demon’s attack is intriguing and frightening all at once because nothing Bobby knows, and he knows a lot after this many years in the business, about demons and what they want jives with the story from the mother. He’s never heard of a demon dealing for anything but a soul, let alone something as small as a favour that won’t hurt someone, but it’s been twenty two years and the mother is living, breathing, still human and has a soul.  
  
None of it adds up at all and Bobby can’t find any real significance in the way the eldest boy died either. There’s no lore linking fire, ceilings, and a slashed stomach and they’re the only details Tyson had passed along. Too many people die in house fires for him to be able to get an accurate fix on which ones could be linked to the demon and he can’t even say whether the ones who made the deals died or survived.  
  
He  _really_  doesn’t want to speculate on just what the demon wants access to the house to do, regardless of the binding word that no one is harmed if they don’t interrupt, because there’s a twelve year old boy involved and Bobby doesn’t think any hunter isn’t affected by cases involving kids.  
  
Tyson calls in, “told you these  _newfangled contraptions_  were good for something, you grumpy old bastard,” he says with a laugh, when they’re an hour out from the yard and Bobby rubs at his eyes then gets up from the desk to start something to eat. There’s a pot of chili simmering on the stove when he hears the loud rumble of an engine and the dogs start up.  
  
The sight of the well-kept Chevy makes him think that maybe it won’t be so hard to get along with these folks as he’d thought. Tyson climbs out of the passenger side, muttering disgruntledly at the still growling dogs, and nods to Bobby. “Singer!”  
  
He calls the dogs off with a sharp whistle and jerk of his head towards the house. They obediently trot back onto the porch. “Richardson,” he says in greeting and watches as a tall, solid man exits the driver’s side of the car. Dark hair spotted with hints of grey and intently focused dark eyes are the first things he notices. The man moves with the same military efficiency that makes Tyson the kind of hunter that Bobby sends out after the big cases and he thinks that it’s true that you don’t ever really leave the Corps.  
  
The blonde woman who slides out of the back seat doesn’t look like anything more than a pretty little housewife, he thinks at first glance, but the second the floppy-haired boy exits the car he can see the change in her posture, face, and entire demeanour. Sharp eyes take stock of him instantly and he relaxes the set of his own shoulders to compensate for any threat she might find in him.  
  
“John Winchester,” the man says and his handshake is steady and strong. “My wife, Mary, and our son Sam.” Bobby notes the barely-there hitch in his voice over the word ‘son’, the way he cuts it short and sharp, and pretends he doesn’t see the way John’s eyes gloss over for a split second before he blinks. He just returns the handshake.  
  
“Call me Bobby. Got some chili heatin’ up inside if you haven’t eaten.”  
  
Sam’s eyes, some colour between brown and green that Bobby can’t quite get a handle on, slide past him to the porch where one of the puppies is lurching clumsily up the steps. A smile quirks the corners of his mouth upwards. “Boys and dogs,” he says as the family moves past him and nods to Sam. “They’re all friendly, kid. Go for it.”  
  
/.\  
  
Tyson takes Sam outside to play with the dogs after dinner after a significant look from Bobby.  
  
“Havin’ real trouble narrowin’ down the lore on whatever this bastard is,” the older man says without preamble when John and Mary’s eyes shift to focus on him. “Tyson gave me the bare bones to get started but I need everythin’ you can remember if I’m gonna be able to help track it.”  
  
Mary takes a deep breath and John covers her hand with his as Bobby pulls a blank notepad towards himself. “We were tracking this pattern of strange deaths in 1973 and this hunter from out of town was following me…”  
  
/.\  
  
The uncoordinated puppy from the steps is sprawled in Sam’s lap, legs akimbo and belly happily bared while his tail beats a steady rhythm on the boy’s thigh, when Tyson looks up from the boxer who’s ears he’s been scratching for the last fifteen minutes.  
  
“How you doing?” he asks quietly. “With everything. It’s been a hell of a couple months and I know that Thanksgiving and Christmas kind of sucked.”  
  
Sam shrugs one shoulder, fingers still rubbing at the excitable puppy’s belly, and doesn’t look up. “School’s easier,” he admits after a moment. “Some people are still acting weird and everything but I can concentrate in class better and I still get to sit with Beth and James at lunch. Mom’s been teaching us stuff when I’m done with homework and Dad’s home from work. Uncle Edward calls pretty often.”  
  
Tyson absorbs his words in silence. “I miss him too,” he offers and leans back against the junker they’re sitting by. “My mom and dad miss him and, by God, does Beth miss him. They still set an extra place at the table some nights.”  
  
His fingers don’t pause on the dog’s stomach but Tyson can hear Sam’s breath hitch a little bit. “I miss him a lot,” the twelve year old says after another moment. “I know he was never even there at the apartment but it still feels empty without him. Dad didn’t readjust the Impala’s seat or mirrors until we had to drive as far as here and he didn’t even have to say anything but I could tell it broke his heart. Mom can’t make pie anymore and she gets this-this  _look_  on her face when she tells me stuff about demons.” He swallows, takes a ragged breath, and finally looks at Tyson. His eyes are fierce and terrified all at once. “Tank sleeps on my bed now and he’s never slept anywhere but Dean’s before.”  
  
Tyson stretches out his free hand to settle it beside Sam’s on the puppy. “He was there your whole life, Sam,” he says. “It’s gonna take a lot longer than a couple of months to get used to anything else.” He leans to the side and nudges him. “Hell, you could get as old as me and still not be used to it and that would be okay. You know, for what it’s worth, I think you’re doing real good. He’d be so proud of you.”  
  
Those words are all it takes for Sam to turn and bury his face in Tyson’s shoulder as the tears come. Tyson holds him there with steady arms and lets him cry himself out.  
  
/.\  
  
Bobby has a page of cramped notes and a dull ache in the pit of his stomach by the time Mary and John are done with their story. He rubs his eyes and pushes the paper away before standing up and moving from the table to bring over the bottle of rotgut. He pours John three fingers, Mary two, and tips whatever’s left into his own glass.  
  
“So we know that he needed to be invited in, there was blood involved, and he wants something with the kids that isn’t going to hurt them,” he says tiredly. “Demons are shifty like that. Stick to the letter of the deal but use the loopholes. It sounds like he only needed the invite for the first time and that maybe he only gets violent when he’s interrupted.  I’ll try and get as much as I can on suspicious circumstances back in ’73 where the same deals coulda been made and then anything hinky going down in those families with kids after ’83.”  
  
Mary nods, hands wrapped around the tumbler of whiskey, and John tips back half his glass in one swallow. “Any idea what we do in the meantime?” he asks roughly. “How we keep Sammy safe and get ready for when we find this bastard?”  
  
Bobby looks at him, long and appraising, and takes a mouthful of his own whiskey. “You keep your boy inked,” he says evenly. “Couple places and permanently when he’s older. Over the heart, one on the hip or the wrist as well. I’ve got some amulets you’ll need to start wearing and I wouldn’t go back to your house.”  
  
Both of them nod. “He’s got a standing invitation there,” Mary murmurs. “We’ll sell and get another place.”  
  
“When you settle somewhere make the protections part of the architecture. Paint devil’s traps over the doors and all the ceilings, a shade or two off the base colour, and put ‘em on the bottom of rugs and doormats.” Bobby tips back the rest of his whiskey. “Permanent salt lines across every doorway and as many iron and silver fixtures as you can.”  
  
John taps his fingers against his glass. “And as far as dealing with the rest of the supernatural?”  
  
“Sounds like the most worryin’ thing you gotta deal with is this demon,” Bobby says and raises an eyebrow. “Tyson didn’t say you were interested in hunting other stuff.”  
  
“We aren’t jumping into this blind,” Mary says quietly. “I’ve been out of the loop for a long time but once you know what’s out there you’re a target, I remember that much. I’m not planning on letting anything, demon or otherwise, get close enough without getting taken down. We can teach Sam, keep him safe, but I need a refresher and John needs teaching first.”  
  
Bobby looks between Mary’s pale eyes and John’s dark ones. The decision only takes seconds to make but he still hesitates.  
  
“Got a salt and burn, easy job, a couple hours away,” he says finally. “Was gonna send Tyson on it tomorrow. Spirit isn’t violent yet but seems to be heading that way so it needs to be taken care of. Sound like somethin’ you’d want to tag along on?”  
  
Mary’s nod is quick, decisive, and John straightens almost imperceptibly as though the idea of doing _something_ is a relief.  
  
Bobby can definitely understand that.  
  
 **/.\  
**  
Bobby Singer sends the Winchesters off on the morning of the 30 th with a promise to stay in touch and when they return to Kansas they ring in 1996 without fanfare.  
  
The apartment is half in boxes and Mary makes hot chocolate in four mugs before she catches herself. They let the fourth sit on the coffee table in front of them by wordless agreement and all three find themselves with eyes on it more often than not.  
  
John leaves it there when he takes the three empty mugs to the kitchen to be rinsed.  
  
They don’t touch the champagne that fizzles and goes flat where it is left out on the kitchen counter and they don’t bother eating any of the Chinese takeout that John had called in for. The container of egg rolls is almost more of a taunt than the cooled hot chocolate still sitting on the coffee table.  
  
Sam is the one who packs the full containers back into the bag and shoves the entire thing into the fridge. If he’s breathing a little heavily when he returns to the living room and reclaims his spot on the sofa then no one says a thing.  
  
Edward calls to wish them a happy New Year and so do the Richardsons and the Halls who had lived across from them for nineteen years. James Hall, their eldest, had been the Robin to Dean’s Batman since the two were old enough to crawl.  
  
Mary feels a pang of regret for the days that she knows are long gone now when she hangs up the phone after that.  
  
John’s hand on the back of her neck, heavy and warm, snaps her out of wondering where they’re going to be next New Years. She looks up at him and he tucks a stray piece of hair behind her ear. The expression that crosses his face isn’t a smile but she thinks that’s okay.  
  
“Ramble on, baby,” he says and presses his lips to her temple briefly as tears sting at her eyes. She can hear the same tears in his voice. “S’all we can do.”  
  
Sam curls up between them on the sofa, underneath a warm blanket, when they watch the countdown. There is no talk of resolutions this year because they all know that there is only one, one thing they need to do, and it is all of theirs.  
  
/.\  
  
January wanes, unusually cold even for Kansas, and John parks the Impala in the small garage of their new house on Friday the 19th when he gets home from work. He sits in the car for a little while, fingers resting on the smooth surface of the dash, and thinks about the first time Dean had ever sat in the driver’s seat.  
  
It takes him a long time to bring himself to get out and go inside.  
  
Sam and Mary are already in the living room, journals and newspapers spread over the carpet and coffee table, and they look up simultaneously when he reaches the doorway. There is a faint sense of familiarity in the sight that is becoming less and less strange each time he sees it. He knows that one day the part that knows this sight will be bigger than the one that screams in protest at Dean’s absence.  
  
He needs that hope that it will stop hurting so much as much as the father in him rails at the idea of ever getting used to his boy not being there.  
  
Sam nods at him, murmurs a quiet “Hey Dad,” and returns his attention to the mass of paper. John wonders where the bouncing, overeager Sammy he misses so dearly has gone and ends the train of thought before he thinks on it long enough to come to the inevitable conclusion.  
  
Mary's smile of greeting is small and nowhere near as blinding or heart-stopping as the one he remembers receiving more afternoons than he could count. It's still something, though, and John is going to hold onto that for as long as he possibly can.  
  
/.\  
  
On Dean’s seventeenth birthday there are two blank journals on the kitchen table when John and Sam follow the sounds of activity there. Mary is behind the counter, coffee brewing and a cup of cocoa waiting for Sam, and she nods at the table with already red eyes.  
  
“They’re for you,” she says and her voice holds steady. “I thought we could stay home and start them today.”  
  
Sam buries his face in her shoulder as her hand cradles the back of his head. John wraps his arms around both of them and they stay that way for a long time.  
  
/.\  
  
John is still at the table that night, long after Mary and Sam go to bed, with the journal open in front of him. He stares at the blank pages and eventually turns to the back cover, fingers running over the soft leather and thick paper, to settle a trimmed Polaroid into the corner.  
  
A staple in each corner holds it there and he reaches for a pen.  
  
He prints Dean’s name at the top of the picture, above their laughing faces and the gleam of the Impala, and his birthdate. He pauses before writing another date next to it, sucks in a shaky breath, and then stops and simply looks at the photo for a long moment.  
  
 _Carry on, my wayward son,_  he writes beside it when his hands stop trembling. He blinks stinging eyes and takes a steadying breath.  _Keep the light on and a cold one waiting for me._  
  
“Happy birthday, Ace. You know the rest,” he murmurs aloud, touching his fingertips to the photo, and then closes the journal gently.  
  
Mary is still awake when he crawls into bed. Her hand is warm when she settles it in the middle of his chest. “You okay?” she whispers into his shoulder. “Thought I was going to have to come out and drag you to sleep.”  
  
“I just needed some time to think.” He turns onto his side and draws her into the curve of his body with a slow exhale. “I’m here now.”  
  
She presses her lips to the skin over his heart, the skin underneath the tattoo, and stays a moment before turning her face so her cheek is pillowed there. “If I could take his place I would,” she says and the fabric between them dampens. “In a heartbeat.”  
  
“I know,” John says and stops before his voice can break. There are as many things he won’t say as things he can’t.  
  
It takes them a long time to fall asleep.  
  
 **interlude: john**  
  
 _John won’t ever forget the first spirit they banish.  
  
Standing beside Mary as she salted and threw a burning match onto the bones is the closest he’s come to an open flame that wasn’t confined to the stovetop since the fire.  
  
Sam watches with intent eyes from a few yards away and Tyson has a double barrelled shotgun loaded with iron rounds on his shoulder. Mary says a quiet blessing over the bones, a plea for the spirit’s safe passage and everlasting rest, and John wonders what became of his son’s spirit because no one said those same words while he burned.  
  
He wants to hope that there’s something like the Bible’s Heaven out there, that Dean made it there, but he doesn’t know what to believe in anymore.  
  
/.\  
  
Dean’s birthday hurts like a fresh wound. John thinks about taking off for a few days, thinks about it when he’s sitting there staring at bright eyes and brighter smiles immortalised in a Polaroid, until he remembers a tiny finger poking at his chest and narrowed green eyes.  
  
He chokes on a breath when he remembers a fierce little voice telling him that you **never** leave the people you love and the way he felt more chastened by that scrunched up nose and furrowed eyebrows than any CO he’d ever had.  
  
John dreams of fire and blood most nights but that night he dreams of freckles and a medley of warbling, off-key Zeppelin.  
  
/.\  
  
In February there’s a witch on the loose around Wisconsin.  
  
Edward calls Mary for the instructions for a hex bag from her father’s journal but they’re too late and days later John reads and rereads the newspaper article about the tragic death of the star-crossed lovers.  
  
“He was sleeping with his secretary,” Mary says when she puts her hands on his shoulders. Her voice is even. “She found the book in a pawn shop. Uncle Ed said she probably didn’t have a clue she was actually going to kill him and after she did remorse pushed her over the edge.”  
  
“How many times have we seen news reports or read articles about things that were supernatural?” he asks quietly. “How many of us live in the dark until we lose something in a way we can’t explain?”  
  
Mary presses a kiss to the top of his head. “Even the hunters who are born come from a line that was made,” she says. “You won’t ever underestimate what hides in the dark again, John.”  
  
He hears the unsaid apology in the second kiss and the quiet sound of her footsteps as they disappear down the hallway.  
  
/.\  
  
Mike stops trying to get him to come out for a beer after work sometime in March.  
  
John realises all at once that he doesn’t remember the last time Sam had spent an afternoon or weekend with friends. He doesn’t know if Mary speaks to any of the women she used to spend time with. He doesn’t remember their new neighbours’ names.  
  
The surprise in Jason and Renee’s faces when they answer the door to the three of them one Friday night hits John like a punch.  
  
The nervous, tentative smile on Beth’s face when she steps forward to hug Mary is heartbreaking and John swears to himself that they’re not sacrificing everything to this quest for vengeance.  
  
/.\  
_  
 _It only takes until April for him to realise that they might not have a choice._  
  
 **iii.**  
  
The Winchesters go to the shooting range on Sam’s thirteenth birthday. John coaches him through gun maintenance with a pearl-handled Colt while Mary reacquaints herself with the kick of a shotgun.  
  
Sam is more focused and conscientious in the gun range than most of the young men John remembers going through training with. He admits quietly to Mary, that first night, that Sam’s better with a gun than he’d been to start with.  
  
Mary’s laugh at that is a little less forced than usual. The smile Sam gives him the next time they return, when he takes a step back to let the thirteen year old load the gun himself, feels almost like a sign that they’re going to be okay one day. John doesn’t think he’s ever felt as connected and useful to Sam as he does in that moment.  
  
They spend every Sunday after that at the shooting range and John tries not to compare them to Sundays in the park with Dean and the soft leather of baseball mitts.  
  
Edward, Annette, Mark and Johnny come to visit for a fortnight in July. Edward and Annette bring armfuls of books and recount rumours and lore to Mary around the dining table. Mark and Johnny corral Tyson and John into sparring and Sam flits between the two groups.  
  
Sam has a collection of bruises when they leave that make John’s heart hurt at the same time it burns with pride. The smile on his face leans more towards a smirk than anything he’s ever seen on his son before and he tries not to think about how easily the expression sits on his little boy’s features.  
  
After that John saves his hand-to-hand practice for Tyson, who seems to silently understand just how hard John is fighting to keep his humanity, and by the time the beginning of the school year comes around again they’re all standing a little taller.  
  
/.\  
  
In August, Mary carries a pile of papers into the living room on a Friday afternoon.  
  
“There’s a werewolf on the loose a few towns over,” she says and puts the papers down in front of John and Sam. “Use the lore and the evidence we have and give me everything you can come up with.”  
  
Sam pushes away his journal and reaches for the papers with eager hands and John looks up at her with incredulous eyes. “A werewolf, Mary?”  
  
She shrugs one shoulder. “Tyson’s going after it when the full moon comes around,” she says. “We’re going to be tracking a demon. Werewolves are predictable in comparison.”  
  
“Tyson already knows who it is and how to kill it, right?” Sam asks without looking up. “This is a test.”  
  
Mary ruffles his hair. John reaches for his own journal and there is still a part of him that thinks he’s going to wake up one day, back in _their_ house, to the sound of Dean’s voice and Sam’s laughter and Mary dancing in the kitchen.  
  
It gets smaller, their new reality growing ever larger, every day that doesn’t happen.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam reads version after version of the Bible, cover to cover, in the months after Dean’s death. He doesn’t know if he believes in God, because he doesn’t understand how a benevolent God could have let what happened to his brother happen, but he believes in demons with everything he has.  
  
It’s September when he finds a line in the battered King James copy and stares at it for a long time before pulling his journal towards him and reaching for the pen on his bedside table. He smooths out the blank page between the front and the first lined page and hesitates for just a moment before putting the tip of the pen to the crisp white.  
  
 _Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter 5:8._  
  
He doesn’t put a picture there like he knows John has because there is still a part of him that keeps the good memories locked away, where the ugliness of the reality can’t touch them, and doesn’t want to let them out again.  
  
He isn’t sure he could put them back if he did and he’s learnt that softness is weakness.  
  
Sam doesn’t ever want to be weak again.  
  
/.\  
  
A poltergeist lays John out when he and Tyson go after it a little before Halloween in 1996. He’s unconscious for almost five minutes and the hospital keeps him under observation for two days before sending him home with painkillers for bruised ribs and a busted collarbone.  
  
He asks about Dean eight times within the week, confused and disorientated, and the first anniversary of the fire passes without him realising. Mary and Sam don’t tell him, envy and pity warring in both of them, and when his memory clears enough for him to realise it on his own he spends three days at Tyson’s apartment.  
  
“I’m not angry,” he says when the weight of the younger man’s expectant gaze is too much to ignore. “Not at them. Not really.”  
  
Tyson lets the half-truth pass and repeats it to Mary over the phone when John falls asleep on the sofa.  
  
“Thanks,” she says with naked relief in her voice. “We just didn’t think he was up for it.”  
  
“I know,” Tyson says. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”  
  
After he hangs up he takes out his hunting journal and opens it to the last picture of his unit that had ever been taken. He finds his own face, dusty and so _young_ , and looks at the words printed underneath.  
  
“For all that we had seen of war,” he reads quietly. “I had never known it so intimately as I did in the darkness of your absence.”  
  
He leaves the book open to that page on the coffee table in silent camaraderie and retreats to his bedroom. The way John grips his forearm and nods at him when he leaves to return home is proof enough that he understands.  
  
/.\  
  
They don’t watch the battered copy of _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_ the second Thanksgiving after the fire. They eat Chinese food and research the gun made by Samuel Colt that is supposed to even be able to kill a demon. None of them doubt that it exists anymore because they’re never going to do what they need to do without it.  
  
There are tears in Mary’s eyes for the first time in a while when they put the journals and old books away and December feels heavier this time around.  
  
John hits the whiskey one night before Christmas, the hardest he has in years, and there is a year worth of frustration and fear and grief that ignites when Mary’s voice rises just a little too high and her words cut just a little too deep.  
  
They’re screaming and slinging accusations that have been hidden behind gritted teeth and heavy tongues almost before they even realise they’re fighting.  
  
Sam’s face is pale and streaked with tears, his eyes too young for the thousand yard stare in them, when he interrupts their argument to slam John’s open journal onto the kitchen table. His fingers press against the Polaroid there so hard that his fingernails are white and both Mary and John are shocked into sudden silence.  
  
“Don’t use him against each other,” he says and the way he bites at his bottom lip to stop it trembling sobers John up more than any of Mary’s words had. “You don’t get to use him against each other. Not _ever_.”  
  
He doesn’t speak to either of them again until Christmas Eve.  
  
/.\  
  
“We’re compiling lists,” Tyson says to Mary in early January. John is at the shooting range with Sam and things between the three Winchesters are still a little fractured. “There aren’t many but we’ve found a handful of people who made deals like yours for different reasons. The same demon made them all. Yellow eyes.”  
  
Mary’s fingers tighten around the pen in her hand even as she nods calmly.  
  
“And the children?” she asks.  
  
“They all have children,” Tyson says. “A couple of suspicious animal deaths. Two where the other parent went to check on the kid and the house burnt down when they didn’t make it out. Neither of the surviving parties saw anything so we can’t confirm if it was the same but Singer is pretty convinced.”  
  
“Annette’s in touch with someone on the east coast who knows a lot about summoning specific demons,” Mary says after a moment. “So if we can get a name or some kind of identifier we could bring him right to us.”  
  
“Not without the Colt.” Tyson puts his hand on her shoulder. “And not without leverage either. If he wants something with these kids, with _Sam_ , we need to find out what that is and how to stop it. He might not be the only thing we have to worry about.”  
  
/.\  
  
Sam stands by the choices his family makes in the aftermath of the demon. He stands by their priorities and decisions and doesn’t regret the fact that his nights and weekends aren’t typical, not by any definition of the word, for a teenager.  
  
Sometimes he regrets that they can’t fight like a normal family anymore. He hates that just the mention of Dean’s name is enough to make John look ten years older and Mary ten times harder. He hates that he can tell there are parts of them that blame each other.  
  
He doesn’t acknowledge the quiet sense of betrayal he feels when Beth goes to college out of state and he doesn’t acknowledge the slow-growing isolation that results from those choices. He clings to the knowledge about what hides in the dark, tells himself that the fact that he _knows_ means he has a responsibility, and hears his brother’s voice tell him “with great power comes great responsibility, Sammy.”  
  
Sam thinks about the dog eared comic books that burned in his room with his brother and feels all the weight of that responsibility at once.  
  
He convinces himself that this is simply the way things have to be, right up until Dean’s eighteenth birthday, until Beth calls the house while his parents are going over weather maps and newspaper clippings spread over the kitchen table.  
  
The conversation is nothing remarkable to begin with.  
  
“I know there’s something you guys are hiding,” Beth says suddenly, in the middle of talking about her classes, and Sam can hear the wobble in her voice. There’s a sharp pang somewhere in his gut that he hasn’t felt in a while. “Mom’s as worried about your parents as she is about Tyson and I think Dad’s more pissed at being left out of it than anything. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what’s going on but I want you to promise me something, okay?”  
  
“Okay,” Sam says and he hopes so badly that he’s not going to have to break that promise. He thinks that Dean would want to kill him for hurting Beth after everything they’ve been through the last few years. Sometimes he thinks that Dean wouldn’t have wanted them to end up like this, not at all, but then he remembers blood and fire and it’s all too easy to justify to himself.  
  
Sometimes he has to try to forget blood and fire and the fact that Dean doesn’t _exist_ anymore because there’s never enough room to think about anything else when he remembers that.  
  
“Just-” she swallows audibly and Sam’s grip on the phone tightens a little. “Just make sure you don’t disappear? I know we had no idea how much we all depended on him to keep us together until we lost him but don’t let anyone think that means we don’t have to stay together because we do.” He hears her breathe in deeply. “We’ve still gotta stay together, Sammy, even if we’re not all in the same place.”  
  
“I can do that,” he agrees without hesitation and it doesn’t even feel like a lie. “You’re family, Beth, and that isn’t ever going to change. I promise.”  
  
He takes John’s place at the table when they swap the phone over. Mary slides a newspaper clipping towards him and holds his gaze deliberately when he reaches for it. “We’re doing the right thing,” she says and Sam is long past wondering whether she actually reads his mind. “You know we are.”  
  
Sam nods and accepts it because there is no room for doubt in their lives anymore.  
  
He takes Dean’s amulet out of his bedside drawer and starts wearing it the next morning. The prick of the bronze tips against his fingertips becomes an anchor and he keeps a spare leather cord in his pocket every time he leaves the house.  
  
John buys him a sturdy silver chain to replace the leather cords for his fourteenth birthday.  
  
/.\  
  
The Winchesters and the Harvelles meet because of a wendigo. Bill Harvelle’s last encounter with the monster left him with a permanent limp and recurring nightmares and, when reports of it surface again, Bobby Singer puts him in touch with Tyson who brings the Winchesters along.  
  
“The more guns the better with a wendigo,” he says when the four walk into Harvelle’s Roadhouse and Bill raises a questioning eyebrow. “Bill, Ellen and Jo Harvelle. Meet John, Mary and Sam Winchester.”  
  
Jo and Sam watch each other from opposite ends of the room with wary eyes while Mary and Ellen pour over the maps spread across the bar and Bill introduces John and Tyson to Pastor Jim Murphy.  
  
Sam stands a little straighter when he hears Bill call the pastor a demon expert and John waves him over towards them.  
  
Jim’s face is open and kind and Sam wonders how he can still look like that if he’s seen enough to be a demon expert. He meets the older man’s eyes and feels the strength in the fingers that land on his shoulder and doesn’t wonder anymore.  
  
“Why don’t you tell me your story?” Jim says.  
  
/.\  
  
“My mom says a demon got your brother,” Jo says when the adults leave them at a table with burgers and a basket of fries and go into the back room with their maps. She’s twelve years old and Sam, fourteen and not used to company his own age anymore, can almost feel the curiousity rolling off her in waves.  
  
Sam glances up at her words. “Yeah,” he says after a moment and tugs a stray piece of onion out of the side of his burger. It’s been a long time since he’s had to tell the story from beginning to end like he had to Jim and he feels vaguely hollow. “Couple years ago.”  
  
“And you didn’t know anything about monsters and stuff before that?” she asks. Her eyes are on the basket of fries as she picks out a handful and drops them onto her plate but her voice is sympathetic. “That must have sucked.”  
  
Sam appreciates that more than the standard ‘sorry for your loss’ and takes a fry and chews it slowly while he turns it over and over in his head. “My mom knew,” he says after he swallows it. “Her family were hunters but she gave it up after the same demon killed them ten years before I was born. He wants something with us.”  
  
Jo’s eyes widen and her own fry falls from her fingers. “Like a vendetta or something?”  
  
He finishes a bite of his burger and shrugs. “We dunno. He’s done stuff to other families but we don’t know why or what he wants. That’s what we’ve been trying to find out.”  
  
“Why are you here then?” she asks, leaning back in her chair, and her nose crinkles in thought. Sam sees Beth in that, for just a second. “We don’t get very many demon hunters. They’re dangerous. Most hunters stay away from them.”  
  
“Tyson’s helping your dad with the wendigo,” Sam says and shrugs again. “He’s teaching us stuff while Mom tries to track the demon. She says that when you know what’s out there you need to learn how to deal with all of it so I guess we’re here to learn. Father Murphy knows a lot about demons so we were gonna need to talk to him anyway. Two birds with one stone.”  
  
She hums agreement around her own burger and the silence, not necessarily comfortable, is bearable after that.  
  
/.\  
  
Jo hugs Sam goodbye three days later, when the wendigo is done and dusted and they’re getting ready to leave, and he’s surprised enough to pat her on the back before she lets go.  
  
Ellen clasps Mary’s hands and says “Come back soon. All of you.”  
  
Bill and John share a nod, a half salute, and squeeze each other’s forearms.  
  
Jim pats all of their shoulders and stares into each Winchester’s eyes with an odd smile lifting the corners of his mouth. Mary’s face is unreadable but John returns the half-smile. He doesn’t say anything before he leaves and Sam wonders to himself if all priests are so odd.  
  
The numbers for the Roadhouse and Jim Murphy are on a slightly bloodstained piece of paper in John’s breast pocket and Tyson feels oddly satisfied afterwards.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam thinks about it, really thinks about it, during the summer after freshman year and decides that he’s pretty sure hunters aren’t really the type to have friends. He knows that he puts on a smile at school but he doesn’t call any of his classmates _friends_ anymore.  
  
Mary doesn’t speak to people outside of hunting circles and John seldom even mentions anyone outside of people like Bobby Singer, Bill Harvelle, Jim Murphy and Tyson anymore. They were a social family before this and Sam thinks how easily they let that go says something important.  
  
Sam considers calling Beth because he thinks she’d be proud that they’ve skipped him a grade and he’s going to be a junior when the summer ends. He remembers that she’s still on the East coast this summer and dials the number for the Roadhouse instead.  
  
Jo’s voice is bright when she answers and Sam changes his mind when he feels a sense of relief at the sound of her greeting.  
  
Hunters are only really friends with other hunters.  
  
/.\  
  
“There’s so little to go on,” Mary says and rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms. “It’s been over two years and we’re just hitting dead end after dead end. We can’t find the Colt and we still don’t know enough about the demon to _do_ anything.”  
  
“We’ll get him, Mary,” Edward says and his hand curls around the back of her neck to squeeze reassuringly. “We’ll get him. You’ve just got to be patient.”  
  
“Doesn’t matter whether it takes ten months or ten years, does it?” The words are rough and low and John’s hands are in loose fists on the table when they look over to him. His eyes are angled down, fixed on the scars that pepper his knuckles, while he talks. “It doesn’t matter when it happens because none of it is going to bring Dean back.”  
  
“No, it won’t,” Annette agrees quietly after a moment of silence. “But when it happens it means he won’t be able to take Sam from you and isn’t that the best we can hope for?”  
  
Edward and Annette stay for ten days. The phone rings on the eighth day and Mary comes into the living room after the call with wide eyes and a pale face.  
  
John pushes himself up off the sofa instantly. “Mary?”  
  
She looks up at him. “That was Singer. We were right. The demon’s after the kids.” Her hands twitch by her sides, halfway to fists, before she twists her fingers into the hem of her shirt. “It’s the kids, John, he wants Sam.”  
  
/.\  
  
It’s nine weeks after Bobby Singer calls with the information that Mary gets confirmation of the most irrefutable kind when the pizza delivery man can’t move from the doormat.  
  
The gangly college student’s name is Martin and he’s delivered to them before but this time his eyes flicker black when he can’t step back off the mat. “Clever.” The word is sneered through bared teeth and Mary lifts her chin even as panic settles in her stomach. “You know that you won’t always have him behind devil’s traps.”  
  
Her voice is steady when she calls out for John and both he and Sam appear in the hallway a moment later. “What do you want?” she asks and John is a solid warmth at her side.  
  
Martin’s mouth twists into a vicious smile that doesn’t suit his face. “Just checking in on our investment.” One black eye closes in a wink and Sam presses against her other side with an angry sound. He immediately starts reciting the exorcism, fingers suddenly tight around her wrist, and the demon tips his head back and laughs.  
  
Sam’s rapid Latin does what it needs to. Martin faints when the black smoke spills from his mouth and John calls an ambulance.  
  
He calls Bobby Singer right after.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam is fifteen and a junior when he hits his growth spurt. He’s verging on six foot and more in control of his limbs than a lanky teenager has any right to be when they send him out with Tyson for the first time.  
  
“It’s an easy hunt,” Tyson assures them quietly while Sam gets his things together. “Chupacabras. It’ll be a piece of cake and we’ll be back in a couple days.”  
  
John doesn’t think he’s ever going to get used to not having to look down to meet his son’s eyes. Mary doesn’t think she’s ever going to get use to the young man who has taken the place of her little boy.  
  
It’s the first time they’ve both been in the house without Sam and it’s too quiet. They don’t go to bed, sitting up on the sofa with a throw instead, and leave the television on low volume.  
  
“When do we tell him, Mary?” John asks when the moon is high in the sky.  
  
Mary looks at him for a moment. “Not yet,” she says finally. “Let him have a little more time to grow up before we take whatever’s left.”  
  
John nods and doesn’t say that the sentimentality isn’t something he expected of her. He doesn’t expect soft edges from his wife, not anymore, and the surprise is enough for him to let the subject drop.  
  
He realises that it’s pointless, anyway, when Sam returns with Tyson the next day. It doesn’t matter when he and Mary tell Sam that the demon wants him. His son hasn’t been a boy in two and a half years and won’t ever be again.  
  
/.\  
  
“Your brother would have taught you to drive this year,” John says to Sam the morning Dean would have turned nineteen. He folds Sam’s fingers around the keys to the Impala while Mary watches from the doorway with a softer expression than usual. “What do you say, think we should give her a run for him?”  
  
Sam nods silently and, later, between the rumble of the Impala’s engine and the familiar strains of Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits with John in the passenger seat, he thinks he’s as close to content as he’s been since November 2 nd 1995.  
  
He falls asleep that night with his fingers hooked gently around the amulet and chain.  
  
/.\  
  
John and Mary aren’t the ones who tell Sam what the demon wants in the end.  
  
He’s sixteen and in his senior year when he smells sulphur in his history classroom and murmurs “Christo” under his breath while his heart pounds against his ribcage. His teacher, a small woman with black hair and a wide smile, stiffens in the aisle between the lines of desks.  
  
Her eyes are on Sam when they flicker black and when she passes by she pats his shoulder and curves her fingers around to press against the henna tattoo over his heart. The deliberate touch has fear and anger roiling in his gut and he clenches his fists so hard that his blunt fingernails leave crescent shaped marks in his palms.  
  
He’s stuck to his seat when the bell rings at the end of the period and can’t move, or even speak, as his classmates file out of the door. He thinks briefly that someone might have raised the alarm if silence wasn’t so normal for him.  
  
The door closes behind the last student and the invisible pressure holding him down disappears.  
  
“How long have you been in her?” he asks and his voice doesn’t break. “What do you want?”  
  
The demon turns around, eyes completely black, and smiles. The expression makes a shiver run down Sam’s spine and he lurches to his feet. “How long have you been in her?” he repeats. “What do you want?”  
  
“Run along, Sammy.” The voice is sickly sweet. “We aren’t ready for you just yet.”  
  
Her head tips back and a stream of black pours out of her mouth and towards the ceiling before Sam can even start an exorcism.  
  
The woman blinks at him a few seconds later, pale and confused, and he runs for the door.  
  
Five hours later he has two more anti-possession tattoos inked on his skin permanently, a second over his hip and third on the inside of his wrist to reinforce the one over his heart, and even more permanent is the knowledge that his brother didn’t just die trying to defend him.  
  
He died _because_ of him.  
  
/.\  
  
Mark and Johnny track the Colt to a hunter in Colorado, Daniel Elkins, in 1998.  
  
It takes the Campbells, the Harvelles, the Winchesters, Bobby Singer, Jim Murphy and Tyson four months. Four months of the kind of convincing that leaves lines around John’s eyes and a tightness around Mary’s mouth for Elkins to give the Colt to them.  
  
Afterwards, they stay in the back rooms at the Roadhouse. Sam and Tyson take the spare bunk and the futon in Jo’s bedroom and she and Sam are awake long after Tyson.  
  
“You going to tell me why that gun’s so important?” Jo asks quietly when they’re both staring at the ceiling.  
  
“Only thing in the world that can kill a demon,” Sam says and breathes out slowly. “And we’ve gotta kill a demon.”  
  
“You’ve figured out what he wants, haven’t you?” Jo’s voice is steady. She drops her hand over the side of the bunk and Sam stretches his own out to squeeze her fingers briefly.  
  
“Yeah.” Sam lets his hand drop back onto the mattress and blinks at the ceiling. “Yeah, we know what he wants. We just don’t know _why_.”  
  
They don’t fall asleep for a long time.  
  
/.\  
  
Sam finishes high school in 1999 when he’s sixteen and the Winchesters pick up for Singer Salvage Yard two days into the summer. In another world Sam thinks he might have gone to college but he has things to do before even thinking about it.  
  
/.\  
  
Late June sees the Winchesters, the Campbells, the Harvelles and Tyson in Blue Earth doing an exercise that John and Tyson had designed from their Marine training.  
  
They’ve been going for a couple of hours and Sam has managed to lose both his parents and his cousins when Tyson comes skidding into the clearing he’s scoping out with a white knuckled grip on his shotgun and a tear in the shoulder of his shirt. The sight is alarming enough that he breaks cover and runs for Tyson, barely making it out of the tree he’s in before a storm picks up out of nowhere and sends them fleeing for cover.  
  
He and Tyson find themselves in an abandoned hunting cabin, one that neither remembers seeing on the map, with the smell of sulphur hanging heavy in the air when the storm dies down as suddenly as it began. Tyson’s shotgun is packed with iron rounds and Sam has an iron knife and they stand back to back between the rattling door and splintered window.  
  
“Easy now,” Tyson says quietly and he’s solid and steady at Sam’s back. “Don’t let it get into your head, okay? Calm and collected.”  
  
“I remember,” Sam bites out from between clenched teeth as his hands tighten around the knife. “We don’t have the Colt so we just need to get rid of it, right?”  
  
“We need information,” Tyson reminds him and shifts his weight as the window cracks, fractured spiderwebs spreading across the glass, to keep himself between Sam and the door. “You got that exorcism in your back pocket anyway?”  
  
“Depends what kind of demon,” Sam says and adjusts his own stance accordingly. “We don’t know how powerful it’s gonna be.”  
  
There’s a beat of silence and a sudden surge of wind that rattles the door harder. “Let’s go with the strongest one you know,” Tyson suggests and settles his finger on the shotgun’s trigger. “Just for safety’s sake.”  
  
The door bursts inwards and off the hinges with enough force to take Tyson to the ground. His head bounces off the floor, the gun skidding, and Sam throws himself in the same direction as the gun but keeps going until his back hits the corner. He can’t be a hundred percent sure but it looks like Tyson’s breathing and his heartrate drops from frantic to just fast. He figures the splintered door should protect the unconscious man from any more debris or ricochets and Sam looks up with the gun in one hand and the knife in the other and sees bright yellow eyes.  
  
“Hi Sammy,” the figure in the empty doorway says as the wind dies down and the voice turns Sam’s insides to ice.  
  
“ _You_ ,” he spits and fires off a round instinctively.  
  
The demon makes a disapproving sound as he steps to the side just enough for the bullet to miss. “Now, Sammy, that’s hardly the way to say hello to an old friend.”  
  
Sam suddenly can’t move his feet, the disruption in balance throwing off the round he fires again. He strains against the sensation and then his head is pressed back against the wall and he can’t move his arms either. “Is this what you did to my brother?” he shouts and his insides aren’t ice anymore. They’re boiling with rage. “Is this what you did to Dean before you murdered him over my bed?”  
  
“Sammy, Sammy, _Sammy_ ,” the demon says and shakes his head slowly. “Collateral damage. Surely you know all about that by now? Your brother would have been fine if he’d left us alone but he put himself right in the firing line. Speaking of firing line-” he flicks a hand and the shotgun flies out of Sam’s unresponsive hand. “Iron rounds? Pesky things. Can’t have you waving that around.” He shakes his head, reproving, and the gun clatters to the ground. “Guns are no toys for children after all.”  
  
Sam makes a sound of rage that has the demon laughing. “What do you want?” he bites out.  
  
“So hostile.” The yellow eyes crinkle as the demon grins. “Your mother was exactly the same. Dean never got a word out, of course, but his face was so very expressive that I felt like I heard him threaten me regardless. I do love you Winchesters, really, such _fire_.”  
  
“I’m going to kill you,” Sam says quietly and ignores the fact that he can almost feel the flames from four years ago. He doesn’t dare close his eyes. “Or my mom will kill you. Maybe even my dad.” His voice drops lower. “I’d love to do it but so long as you’re dead I really don’t care.”  
  
“That isn’t on the schedule. I just wanted to catch up and chat today.” The tone is mild and pleasant and he steps further into the cabin. He glances at Tyson, unconscious and sprawled under the door, and then back at Sam. “No killing necessary. Not today, anyway,” he waves a hand around the cabin. “I had to throw out my original plan when you and your parents and this fellow here started nipping at my heels. Tenacious lot, aren’t you?”  
  
There’s a sudden rattling in the walls again and Sam’s eyes flit from side to side as the demon turns around. Sam can’t see anything from where he’s stuck and struggles again without success. “If you just want to talk then let me go,” he says and glances towards Tyson. “Let both of us go.”  
  
The demon waves a hand at him. “Quiet now,” he says and sounds distracted. “I think we have unexpected company.”  
  
Picking up again suddenly, the wind starts howling and a gust blows over most unsecured fittings in the cabin. The demon sways slightly and is backlit by a bolt of lightning that bursts across the rapidly darkening sky. There is another sharp crack and the demon is stumbling backwards, barely skirting Tyson and the door, as another figure appears in the doorway.  
  
Sam blinks and then blinks again. This figure, in a tattered trench coat with black slacks and a tie with windswept hair, is completely unfamiliar.  
  
The newcomer’s eyes, a brighter blue than Sam thinks he’s ever seen before, narrow and seem to glow with an unnatural light as they land on the demon. “Azazel,” he says and the voice sounds like shards of glass and chunks of gravel all at once.  
  
The demon crumples, head tipping back and mouth opened in a scream, as the black cloud slips through the cracks in the ramshackle ceiling and it’s too late even for a shot at binding the demon there.  
  
Sam, suddenly free from the invisible bindings, turns from the body of the demon’s host and lunges for the shotgun on the floor. He braces himself, crouched in front of an unconscious Tyson, and aims the gun. His hands are steady even as his heart pounds a terrified tattoo against his ribs and it takes only a second for him to set a shot right between the piercingly blue eyes of the stranger. They blink at him, slow and serene, and he shifts his finger to the trigger.  
  
“Who are you?” he demands and then there’s a rumble of thunder and the sharp smell of ozone. It washes out the scent of sulphur and leaves his skin tingling.  
  
Sam closes his eyes, squeezes the trigger, but the smell only gets heavier as the lightbulb dangling from the ceiling explodes in a shower of sparks and what glass was left whole shatters all at once.  
  
“Hello, Sam.”


End file.
